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The  Woman  Movement 
from  the  Point  of  View 
of  Social  Consciousness 


By 

JESSIE  TAFT 


PHILOSOPHIC  STUDIES 

ISSUED  UNDER  THE  DIRECTION  OF  THE  DEPARTMENT  OF 
PHILOSOPHY  OF  THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO 

N  UMBER  6 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO  PRESS 
CHICAGO,  ILLINOIS 


Agents 

THE  CAMBRIDGE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  London  and  Edinburgh 
THE  MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA,  Tokyo,  Osaka,  Kyoto 
KARL  IV.  HIERSEMANN,  Leipzig 
THE  BAKER  &  TAYLOR  COMPANY,  New  York 


The  Department  of  Philosophy  of  the  University  of  Chicago  issues 
a  series  of  monographs  in  philosophy,  including  ethics,  logic,  and  meta¬ 
physics,  aesthetics,  and  the  history  of  philosophy.  The  successive 
monographs  are  numbered  consecutively  with  a  view  to  their  subsequent 
publication  in  volumes.  These  studies  are  similar  to  the  series  of 
Contributions  to  Philosophy ,  but  do  not  contain  psychological  papers  or 
reprints  of  articles  previously  published. 


THE  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  THE  POINT  OF 
VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 


THE  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  THE 
POINT  OF  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL 
CONSCIOUSNESS 


BY 

y 

JESSIE  TAFT 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO  PRESS 
CHICAGO,  ILLINOIS 


Copyright  1916  By 
The  University  of  Chicago 


All  Rights  Reserved 


Published  April,  1916 


NOTE 


I  wish  to  acknowledge  my  indebtedness  to  Professor  James  H.  Tufts 
and  Professor  George  H.  Mead  for  their  advice  and  counsel  in  the  writing 
of  this  thesis  and  to  Miss  Virginia  P.  Robinson  and  Miss  Margaret 
Snodgrass  for  their  aid  in  revising  the  manuscript. 


Jessie  Taft. 


s 


i  \ 


.  r 


' 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 


Introduction . ix 

I.  The  Reality  of  the  Problems  Represented  by  the  Woman 

Movement. 

1.  An  enumeration  of  them  as  both  personal  and  social .  1 

2.  Typical  interpretations  of  them  by  modern  writers . 12 

II.  The  Nature  of  the  Problems  Revealed  in  Their  Relationship' 

i 

to  the  Larger  Social  Situation. 

1.  The  common  basis  of  labor  and  woman  movements  in  the 

conflict  between  a  very  complex  social  order  and  inadequately 
socialized  selves . 24 

2.  A  twofold  conflict  in  lives  of  women,  not  only  that  of  the 

incomplete  personality  and  the  enlarged  social  environment,  shared 
equally  by  men,  but  also  the  more  obvious  conflict  affecting  women 
more  immediately  than  men  between  mediaeval  methods,  standards, 
and  virtues  in  the  home  and  modern  methods,  standards,  and  virtues 
in  the  world . 30 

III.  A  Social  Theory  of  the  Self  as  the  Ground  for  a  Solution 

of  the  Problems  in  both  Woman  and  Labor  Movements. 

1 .  Implications  of  a  genuinely  social  theory  of  self-consciousness 
. 36 

2.  Actual  qualitative  development  of  self-consciousness  histori¬ 
cally . 40 

3.  Appearance  of  socially  conscious  self  and  its  value  for  the 

handling  of  social  problems . *. . 48 

IV.  Conclusion. 

1.  Woman  and  labor  movements  equally  expressions  of  thwarted 

impulses  for  which  there  is  as  yet  no  outlet  compatible  with  the 
present  social  order . 53 

2.  Hope  of  both  movements  in  the  possibility  of  the  appearance 

of  a  genuine  social  science  as  a  result  of  the  growing  prevalence  of 

the  socially  conscious  person . 55 


Bibliography 


58 


THE  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OF  A  LARGER  SOCIAL 

SITUATION 

By 

Jessie  Taft 


I' 


■ 


INTRODUCTION 


For  the.  last  twenty-five  years  or  more,  women,  their  position  and 
function  in  the  scheme  of  things,  their  biological  superiority  or  inferi¬ 
ority,  their  mental  and  physical  characteristics,  their  achievements 
and  failures,  have  been  discussed  and  rediscussed  with  unflagging  interest. 
Every  nook  and  corner  of  feminine  nature  has  been  brought  to  light  and 
examined  as  if  woman  were  a  newly  discovered  species.  Yet  out  of  this 
endless  controversy  only  a  very  general  agreement  has  been  reached. 
It  is  fair  to  say  that  the  majority  of  intelligent  people  today  are  agreed  on 
at  least  two  points :  the  necessity  of  improving  motherhood  and  the  need 
of  some  form  of  useful  work  for  every  woman.  But  here  the  agreement 
ends.  As  to  exactly  what  conduces  to  improved  motherhood  or  con¬ 
stitutes  the  proper  kind  of  useful  labor,  both  masculine  and  feminine 
authorities  disagree. 

In  the  meantime,  while  the  controversy  continues,  despite  the 
approval  or  disapproval  of  the  theorists,  women,  whether  they  wish  it 
or  no,  are  necessarily  affected  by  all  the  changes  in  education,  industry, 
and  government  that  are  in  the  process  of  remaking  society.  Women 
find  themselves  as  a  matter  of  hard  fact  in  the  equivocal  position  of  being 
neither  one  thing  nor  the  other,  neither  in  the  home  nor  out  of  it,  neither 
wholly  mediaeval  nor  wholly  modern.  The  world  to  which  women 
have  been  accustomed  for  centuries  and  to  whose  patterns  their  minds 
have  been  shaped  is  not  for  the  most  part  the  world  of  the  modern  man. 
His  world  is  not  only  different,  it  is  even  hostile  and  antagonistic  in  many 
respects  to  the  world  of  the  woman;  so  much  so  that  women  who  attempt 
to  conform  to  both  worlds,  as  many  are  compelled  to  do,  find  themselves 
face  to  face  with  conflicts  so  serious  and  apparently  irreconcilable  that 
satisfactory  adjustment  is  often  quite  impossible  on  the  part  of  the 
individual  woman.  The  world  outside  the  home  has  proved  itself  so 
ill  suited  to  women  and  children,  even  to  the  extent  of  being  positively 
injurious,  and  the  home  in  its  present  form  has  seemed  to  be  so  little 
adapted  to  the  larger  world’s  ideals  of  trained  motherhood,  scientific 
domestic  economy,  and  socialized  ethics,  that  the  problems  arising  from 
the  clashing  of  the  two  spheres  have  grown  into  great  social  questions 
to  be  handled  by  society  as  a  whole. 

An  unprejudiced  examination  of  the  actual  conditions  which  the 
average  middle  class  woman  has  to  meet  in  adjusting  her  life  to  the 
home  and  to  the  man’s  world  gives  sufficient  evidence  of  the  reality 
of  the  problems  which  are  back  of  the  so-called  “woman  question” 


X 


INTRODUCTION 


and  reveals  their  intimate  connection  with  every  other  great  social 
movement  of  our  day.  The  cry  of  the  uneasy  woman1  is  not  merely 
the  reprehensible  expression  of  her  own  personal  restlessness.  Con¬ 
sciously  or  unconsciously  it  voices  her  share  in  the  protest  of  the  age 
against  the  impossible  situation  in  which  humanity  finds  itself  today, 
and  her  struggles,  even  though  they  seem  to  be  but  a  vain  beating 
against  the  righteous  and  inevitable  order  of  things,  are  a  real  part  of  that 
larger  conflict  which  society  as  a  whole  is  waging  in  its  effort  to  combine 
modern  industry  and  modern  individualism. 

It  is  the  purpose  of  this  thesis  to  determine  just  what  are  the  problems 
represented  by  the  woman  movement,  to  trace  their  connection  with  the 
larger,  more  inclusive  social  problems,  and  to  indicate  in  a  general  way 
the  direction  from  which  a  solution  may  be  expected. 

Tarbell,  The  Business  of  Being  a  Woman. 


I.  THE  PROBLEM 

1.  Personal  and  Social  Aspects 

The  problems  which  justify  the  woman  movement  appear  and  may 
be  handled  under  two  aspects:  first,  as  they  break  out  in  the  life  of  the 
individual  woman  as  personal  difficulties  demanding  some  kind  of  per¬ 
sonal  adjustment;  second,  as  they  take  on  the  guise  of  public  questions 
assuming  such  proportions  as  openly  to  threaten  the  welfare  of  society. 
The  following  section  is  an  attempt  to  treat  them  very  briefly  from  both 
points  of  view.  None  of  this  material  is  new,  but  it  is  well  worth  pre¬ 
senting  as  a  whole  in  condensed  form  that  its  very  bulk  may  convince 
us  of  the  reality  of  what  is  so  often  regarded  as  an  illusion  due  to  the 
restless  and  unstable  character  of  women  always  longing  for  that  which 
they  have  not  and  failing  to  make  use  of  that  which  they  have. 

From  the  standpoint  of  the  individual  woman  the  most  hopeless 
problem,  and  one  which  carries  with  it  a  long  train  of  lesser  difficulties, 
lies  in  the  economic  field.  Here  she  faces  what  appears  to  be  under  our 
present  system  an  almost  insoluble  dualism.  Shall  the  young  girl  of 
today  prepare  for  marriage  or  for  wage-earning,  for  neither,  or  for  both? 
The  women  of  the  laboring  classes  can  indulge  in  little  preparation 
either  for  marriage  or  for  earning  a  living,  yet  for  them  economic  inde¬ 
pendence  is  usually  necessary  before  marriage  and  frequently  after. 
The  women  of  the  wealthier  classes,  on  the  other  hand,  have  the  advan¬ 
tage  of  being  able  to  make  their  own  situation  to  a  large  extent  and 
may  prepare  for  both,  either,  or  neither,  as  they  choose.  On  the  middle 
class  woman,  however,  this  uncertainty  of  training  presses  heavily. 

An  examination  of  all  the  factors  involved  shows  a  heavy  balance 
on  the  side  of  the  ad  visibility  of  preparing  to  earn  a  living.  Marriage, 
housekeeping,  childbearing,  as  commonly  understood  and  practised, 
do  not,  if  one  has  average  intelligence,  necessarily  require  any  special 
training  beyond  that  which  is  picked  up  at  home  or  can  be  acquired 
when  the  time  comes  by  actual  doing.  It  is  possible  and  customary 
to  get  along  as  most  people  do  without  scientific  preparation  for  mar¬ 
riage.  Moreover,  marriage  is  not  a  certainty  upon  which  one  may 
depend  as  a  sure  or  even  probable  means  of  support.  Nor  is  marriage 
for  the  sake  of  livelihood  any  longer  considered  morally  justifiable  and, 
with  that  avenue  cut  off,  the  probability  of  marriage  is  greatly  lessened. 
To  find  a  husband  one  loves  is  not  so  easy  as  finding  merely  a  husband. 
Widowhood,  too,  is  a  possibility  that  must  be  reckoned  with.  But, 
even  granted  the  certainty  of  marriage,  there  are  still  a  considerable 


2 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  EROM  VIEW  OE  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 


number  of  years  during  which  the  young  woman  may  find  economic 
independence  essential.  Modern  economic  conditions  tend  both  to  defer 
marriage  and  so  to  deplete  the  amount  of  work  done  in  the  home  that  in 
many  cases  the  daughter’s  share  is  not  of  sufficient  economic  value  to 
enable  her  father  to  support  her.  Even  when  the  father  is  quite  able  to 
support  his  daughter  indefinitely  or  until  her  marriage,  the  work  which 
falls  to  her  in  the  home  is  seldom  of  such  a  nature  as  to  keep  her  interest 
or  bring  out  and  develop  all  her  unused  resources  and  powers.  As  long 
as  the  mother  is  at  the  helm,  very  little  authority  or  responsibility  is 
likely  to  rest  upon  the  daughter,  and  the  modern  girl  usually  feels  that, 
however  wealthy  her  parents,  she  is  not  justified  in  living  unless  she  is 
engaged  in  responsible  work  and  is  giving  value  received  to  society.  On 
the  whole,  therefore,  even  when  there  is  no  economic  necessity,  self- 
support  or  preparation  for  it  appears  to  be  the  part  of  prudence  and  good 
judgment. 

As  a  result  of  this  training  for  work  in  the  world  rather  than  for  home¬ 
making,  the  desire  of  the  normal  woman  for  a  husband,  children,  and  a 
home  inevitably  clashes  with  other  desires  developed  in  connection  with 
her  work  in  the  world  or  in  her  preparation  for  such  work.  She  natur¬ 
ally  wishes  to  continue  to  do  that  for  which  she  has  been  trained  and  for 
which  she  may  have  a  natural  aptitude.  She  clings  to  her  economic 
freedom.  The  heterogeneous,  unsystematized  work  of  housekeeping 
has  little  attraction  for  one  accustomed  to  regular  hours  and  specialized, 
standardized  work  whose  dignity  as  a  trade  or  profession  is  universally 
recognized.  She  may  realize  that  she  has  not  merely  a  disinclination 
but  a  deep-rooted  distaste  for  household  tasks  and  a  positive  lack  of 
ability  to  perform  them  well.  Knowing  this,  she  must  face  the  possi¬ 
bility  that,  if  she  forces  herself  to  assume  duties  to  which  she  brings 
neither  liking  nor  training,  there  may  arise  a  discontent  with  life  so  great 
as  to  endanger  the  success  of  her  marriage. 

If  she  is  a  woman  with  a  socially  trained  conscience  she  may  even 
feel  that,  if  she  accepts  the  home  under  its  present  conditions  and  allows 
her  husband  to  support  her,  she  owes  it  to  society  to  take  the  time 
before  marriage  to  make  herself  as  fit  as  possible  for  her  duties  as  con¬ 
sumer,  food  preparer,  housekeeper,  childbearer,  and  trainer.  Yet  she 
knows  that  this,  if  taken  seriously,  means  a  second  profession  or  group 
of  professions. 

Furthermore,  to  the  gifted  and  ambitious  woman,  the  woman  who 
has  found  growth  and  freedom  and  happiness  in  her  work,  comes  the  fear 
which  is  almost  certainty,  that  she  too,  like  so  many  others,  if  she  marries. 


THE  PROBLEM 


3 


will  find  her  talents  and  her  ambitions  hopelessly  swamped  by  the  infinite 
detail,  the  wear  and  tear  of  domestic  duties,  and  that  middle  age  will  see 
her  contented,  settled  down,  all  her  possibilities  for  growth  gone  forever, 
even  the  desire  to  do,  dead.  Should  her  zest  for  life  and  work  persist 
to  that  period  when  her  family  duties  no  longer  absorb  her,  will  it  be 
possible  for  her  after  the  long  years  of  absence  to  resume  the  work  for 
which  she  was  trained?  For  the  alert  modern  woman,  conscious  to  her 
finger  tips,  knowing  in  her  heart  that  she  could  give  a  lifetime  of  happy 
associations  to  the  man  she  loved,  and  to  society,  healthy,  normal  children, 
the  deadlock  into  which  the  present  social  order  forces  her  is  a  cruel, 
blighting  thing — a  choice  between  a  crippled  life  in  the  home  or  an  un¬ 
fulfilled  one  out  of  it. 

We  are  not  attempting  in  this  discussion  of  difficulties  arising  on  the 
economic  side  to  justify  any  of  the  conditions  or  attitudes  presented, 
but  merely  to  state  them  as  real  problems  actually  appearing  in  the 
lives  of  many  women.  While  none  of  the  conflicting  impulses  above 
described  may  result  in  the  giving  up  of  marriage  in  a  concrete  case, 
yet  they  tend  to  restrain  the  woman  from  making  any  effort  in  the 
direction  of  matrimony  and  they  make  married  life  more  difficult,  more 
easily  shipwrecked. 

Turning  from  the  economic  to  the  ethical  field,  we  find  that  there  also 
women  encounter  a  dualism.  -The  values  which  they  have  put  first — 
life,  love,  children — are  not  the  values  most  emphasized  by  men  outside 
the  home.  The  fact  that  women  are  forced  to  subordinate  these  values 
if  they  enter  the  man’s  world  as  it  is,  involves  constant  emotional  strain. 
Their  sense  of  relative  values  is  continually  violated.  Equipped  with 
only  a  family  ethics,  women  as  they  go  into  the  larger  world  often  seem 
to  lack  the  loyalty,  the  ethical  consciousness  which  men  consider  essen¬ 
tial  for  such  social  institutions  as  law,  government,  or  business.  Men 
feel  that  honor  as  they  understand  it  is  quite  impossible  for  women, 
because  women  are  so  often  unable  to  see  wrong  in  what  men  condemn 
when  it  does  not  violate  the  closer  relations  and  loyalties  to  which  their 
code  applies;  whereas  women  fail  equally  to  comprehend  the  man’s  dis¬ 
regard  of  the  duties  to  the  immediate  family  and  the  weakness  of  his 
allegiance  to  that  which  is  for  them  supreme. 

This  mutual  incompatibility  of  ethical  standards  due  to  the  difference 
in  the  worlds  to  which  they  were  meant  to  apply  and  the  corresponding 
difference  in  the  emphasis  placed  on  values  is  a  favorite  theme  of  Ibsen 
and  is  brought  out  with  unusual  clearness  in  the  drama  John  Gabriel 
Borkman.  Borkman  who  has  spent  years  in  prison  for  the  dishonest 


4 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 


use  of  other  people’s  money  in  the  making  of  his  own  fortune  is  reproached 
bitterly  by  his  former  sweetheart  for  his  crime,  which,  for  her,  is  found 
to  consist,  not  in  the  fact  that  he  has  broken  the  law  of  the  land,  but  solely 
in  this,  that  he  voluntarily  gave  up  his  love  for  her  and  their  mutual 
happiness  for  the  sake  of  business  advancement,  that  he  killed  the  love 
life  in  her  soul.  When  a  woman  with  such  standards  of  life  burnt  deep 
into  her  soul  attempts  conscientiously  to  reconcile  them  with  what 
the  world  demands  as  honorable,  she  faces  a  herculean  task  which  is 
likely  to  crush  or  harden  her  and  which  she  can  never  accomplish  as  an 
individual. 

The  man  also,  it  is  true,  in  so  far  as  he  too  lives  in  both  the  home  and 
the  world  has  just  as  overwhelming  a  discrepancy  in  standards  and,  as 
an  individual,  is  just  as  unequal  to  the  task  of  dealing  with  them;  the 
strain,  however,  is  usually  not  so  great  because  he  lives  much  less  com¬ 
pletely  than  the  woman  in  both  worlds  and  therefore  feels  much  less 
keenly  the  need  of  harmonization.  The  woman  is  never  allowed  to 
forget  that,  whatever  her  work,  the  home  and  all  that  it  stands  for 
must  be  her  deepest  interest;  she  cannot  throw  off  its  standards  lightly. 
Yet,  if  she  is  to  succeed  in  the  world  without,  she  cannot  afford  to  ignore 
the  rules  as  she  finds  them  there,  whereas  the  man  has  long  treated 
the  home  as  a  pleasant  place  for  week-ends  and  holidays,  essentially  a 
place  where  he  can  and  does  cast  off  the  rules  and  standards  of  his  work¬ 
aday  world.  Nobody  expects  him  to  carry  the  ideals  of  the  home  back 
to  his  business  and  he  has  grown  accustomed  to  keeping  them  shut  off 
in  an  air  tight  compartment  of  his  personality. 

A  part  of  this  ethical  conflict,  but  so  large  and  prominent  a  part 
that  it  looms  up  as  a  separate  problem,  is  the  double  standard  in  sex. 
A  standard  of  absolute  physical  chastity  for  the  woman  is  confronted 
by  a  world  where  almost  unlimited  license  is  taken  for  granted.  This 
fact,  reinforced  by  the  ordinary  training  of  the  home  to  the  effect  that 
sex,  especially  in  all  its  physical  manifestations,  is  inherently  and  mys¬ 
teriously  evil  and  is  allowable  only  when  the  evil  is  counteracted  by  the 
charm  of  the  marriage  ceremony,  that  the  flesh  and  the  devil  are  one, 
may  lead  the  woman  to  revolt  in  disgust  against  sex  in  general,  to  such 
an  extent  that  the  natural  impulse  to  marry  is  actually  checked  by  her 
intense  horror  of  the  physical  relationship  involved  and  by  her  belief 
that  all  men  are  brutes  in  so  far  as  they  seek  sex  satisfaction.2  The 
antagonism  between  her  bringing  up  in  the  home  and  the  world  of  sex 
as  she  finds  it  beyond  the  home,  makes  for  every  thinking  woman  a 
2Havelock  Ellis,  Sex  in  Relation  to  Society ,  II,  p.  77. 


THE  PROBLEM 


5 


problem  that  may  last  over  years  of  her  life — the  task  of  building  up 
an  idea  of  sex  that  is  consistent  with  the  facts  and  yet  leaves  a  universe 
in  which  she  can  live  comfortably,  of  escaping  from  her  own  barren  chas¬ 
tity  while  avoiding  the  man’s  meaningless  license,  of  creating  a  new 
appreciation  and  expression  of  the  most  fundamental  human  instinct. 

In  the  political  field,  the  suffrage  movement  is  the  expression  of  a 
conflict  of  demands  on  the  part  of  society  and  of  impulses  on  the  part 
of  the  individual  woman.  Society  expects  women  to  be  good  and 
useful  citizens.  It  holds  them  responsible  for  the  welfare  of  homes 
and  children  and  is  ready  to  criticize  them  for  failures  within  their 
own  province.  At  the  same  time,  it  makes  direct  responsibility  impos¬ 
sible  for  women  by  forbidding  the  use  of  the  instrument  through  which 
for  the  most  part  civic  control  is  acquired,  The  woman,  on  the  other 
hand,  must  reconcile  her  own  inertia  and  the  natural  inclination  to 
dodge  responsibility  reinforced  as  it  is  by  the  extreme  effort  required 
to  exercise  indirect  influence,  by  public  acquiescence,  and  even  by  legal 
prohibition,  with  a  conscience  awakened  by  a  larger  worldly  experience 
which  insists  that  she  is  already  morally  responsible  and  ought  never  to 
rest  until  she  is  legally  so. 

Even  within  the  apparently  unimportant  realm  of  clothes,  there 
runs  the  same  inevitable  dualism  of  conflicting  demands  and  impulses. 
The  home,  especially  the  home  of  today,  permits  a  style  of  dress  which 
is  impracticable  for  the  woman  who  works  in  the  world.  Men  like  and 
demand  so-called  fashionable  clothes  for  their  women  folk  and  every 
normal  woman  desires  her  apparel  to  be  pleasing  in  the  eyes  of  at  least 
one  man;  yet  women  know  that  the  ultra  feminine  clothes  imposed  on 
them  by  fashion  and  masculine  taste  are  disastrous  for  real  work  and 
make  them  appear  ridiculous  to  the  sober  workaday  world.  They  must 
choose,  therefore,  between  lessened  sex  attraction  and  increased  respect  on 
the  part  of  the  men  with  whom  they  work.  If  the  woman  has  succeeded 
in  suppressing  her  own  yearning  for  fluffy,  frivolous  clothes  which  she 
realizes  make  her  appear  more  desirable  to  the  men  of  her  acquaintance, 
she  has  still  to  face  the  practical  difficulties  of  obtaining  any  other  kind. 
Women’s  clothes,  in  accordance  with  the  desires  of  men  and  the  economic 
changes  in  women’s  work,  have  evolved  along  the  line  of  adaptation 
to  a  class  which  does  no  serious  work,  whose  chief  end  in  life  is  to  attract 
attention  and  elicit  admiration,  and  which  has  no  responsibility  for 
paying  the  bills. 

This  type  of  dress  is  suitable  only  for  the  very  wealthy  leisure  class 
and  for  the  prostitute.  When  the  professional  or  business  women  at- 


6  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

tempts  to  keep  herself  clothed  in  simple  durable  garments  that  are  ap¬ 
propriate  to  her  work  and  her  income,  she  finds  that  she  is  not  free  to 
follow  the  dictates  of  common  sense.  In  order  to  get  what  she  wants 
she  must  expend  time,  money,  and  thought  quite  out  of  proportion  to 
the  value  of  clothes  in  her  life.  For  the  working  girl  in  store  or  factory, 
the  problem  is  almost  insoluble.  For  the  average  working  girl,  a  good 
appearance  is  essential  to  keeping  a  job;  yet  the  only  clothes  within 
her  means  are  the  most  extreme,  the  most  unsuitable  for  her  work,  and 
the  least  durable.  She  cannot  afford  to  buy  such  clothing,  yet  she  can 
never  afford  to  dress  sensibly  unless  she  has  unusual  advantages  in  the 
way  of  skill  in  dressmaking  or  a  home  where  clothes  can  be  made.  A 
woman  wants  to  be  beautiful  in  the  eyes  of  men;  she  also  wants  to  be 
sensible — sometimes.  Men  themselves  demand  of  her  both  beauty  and 
sense;  yet  the  world  in  which  she  is  forced  to  live  at  present  makes  the 
combination  a  difficult  one. 

We  now  turn  back  to  consider  these  same  problems,  but  this  time 
from  the  standpoint  of  society  as  a  whole  rather  than  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  individual  woman. 

On  the  economic  side,  the  dilemma  in  which  woman  as  an  individual 
finds  herself  is  expressed  socially  on  a  large  scale  both  within  the  home 
and  without  it  in  conditions  unfavorable  to  the  welfare  of  the  commu¬ 
nity. 

Under  the  present  organization  of  the  home,  society  must  suffer  the 
consequences  of  an  institution  carried  on  almost  entirely  by  un¬ 
skilled  labor.  Women  have  fallen  into  their  new  role  of  consumers 
without  knowledge  and  without  any  sense  of  responsibility. 

Consumption  as  carried  on  by  the  home  is  still  a  relatively  uncon¬ 
scious  performance3.  Society  must  carry  the  burden  of  badly  nourished 
families  resulting  in  large  part  from  women’s  ignorance  of  food  values, 
of  poorly  clothed  families  due  to  women’s  ignorance  of  textiles,  and  of 
families  that  are  sickly  and  diseased  because  the  mothers  know  nothing 
of  sanitation,  hygiene  or  eugenics.4 

That  society  recognizes  the  weakness  of  its  homes  is  seen  in  the  fact 
that  it  is  attempting  to  correct  evils  connected  therewith  by  various 
laws  and  institutions.  Rash  consumption  is  met  by  such  organizations 
as  the  Consumers’  League  and  by  all  sorts  of  newspaper  and  magazine 
campaigns  calculated  to  educate  women  buyers.  Pure  food  laws  are 
designed  to  protect  families  from  the  ignorant  mother  as  well  as  from 

3Ida  Tarbell,  The  Business  of  Being  a  Woman,  chap.  III. 

4Charlotte  Perkins  Gilman,  Women  and  Economics ,  p.  192. 


THE  PROBLEM 


7 


the  corrupt  dealer.  To  check  the  increasing  amount  of  child  delinquency, 
due  in  large  measure  to  poor  home  conditions,  society  offers  the  juvenile 
court.  The  social  settlement,  the  associated  charities  with  visiting  nurse 
and  housekeeper,  child  welfare  and  household  exhibits  on  a  gigantic 
scale,  baby  health  contests,  schools  for  mothers,  are  society’s  attempts 
to  remedy  the  ignorance  and  unfitness  of  the  mother  in  the  poorer  home. 
Preventive  methods  also  are  being  worked  out  in  schemes  for  an  edu¬ 
cational  system  which  shall  insure  some  training  in  home  making  to  every 
girl  who  attends  public  school.  The  difficulty  is,  of  course,  to  contrive 
some  method  of  giving  her  two  preparations,  one  in  general  housekeeping 
and  child  training  and  another  in  some  vocation  by  which  she  may  earn 
her  living,  if  necessary. 

Outside  the  home,  likewise,  society  feels  the  results  of  untrained  or 
half  trained  workers.  The  occupations  entered  by  women  are  lowered 
by  the  lack  of  a  professional  attitude  on  their  part.  Women  do  not 
take  their  jobs  seriously  enough  because  they  expect  to  marry.  Usually 
they  are  not  well  trained  for  their  work;  but  neither  are  they  thoroughly 
trained  for  home  making  and  society  loses  all  around.5  There  is  great 
waste  involved  in  training  thoroughly  women  who  will  drop  their  work 
in  a  few  years;  there  is  also  waste  in  not  training  them;  but  the  greatest 
waste  of  all,  if  society  expects  the  home  to  continue  to  be  efficient  on  its 
present  basis,  is  in  allowing  them  to  marry,  not  only  unprepared,  but  also 
frequently  unfitted  for  home  work  by  their  experience  in  the  shop  or 
office.6 

The  addition  of  a  large  number  of  unskilled  and  unorganized  women 
to  the  industrial  world  has  tended  to  render  certain  labor  problems  more 
acute  and  more  conscious.  Conditions  which  were  bad  enough  for  men 
come  out  more  sharply  when  applied  to  women.  The  effect  of  long 
hours,  of  night  work,  of  standing  all  day,  of  bad  sanitary  conditions, 
is  more  serious  in  the  case  of  women,  and  the  results  for  their  children, 
if  they  are  married,  or  for  their  future  motherhood,  are  serious  enough 
to  force  the  state  to  protect  them  in  a  measure.  If  women  must  or  will 
work  outside  of  the  home,  society  cannot  afford  to  suffer  because  of 
conditions  not  essential  to  the  work  itself.  Therefore,  we  see  society’s 
consciousness  of  the  woman’s  problem  expressed  in  the  struggle  for  the 
shorter  day,7  in  laws  allowing  time  off  and  part  pay  before  and  after  the 
birth  of  a  child,8  and  providing  means  for  nursing  the  child  during 

6David  Snedden,  The  Problem  of  Vocational  Education. 

eC.  P.  Gilman,  Women  and  Economics ,  p.  245. 

7Louis  Brandeis,  Women  in  Industry. 

8II.  Ellis,  Sex  in  Relation  to  Society ,  I,  p.  21. 


8  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OE  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

working  hours,9  in  various  regulations  obliging  employers  to  furnish 
seats,  better  sanitary  conditions,  and  forbidding  night  work  and  certain 
dangerous  trades.  Only  recently  there  came  up  before  the  school 
authorities  of  New  York  City  as  a  live  and  burning  issue  the  question 
of  what  was  to  be  done  with  women  teachers  who  asked  for  leave  of 
absence  to  become  mothers.  That  this  situation,  which  was  once  merely 
a  personal  problem  for  some  women,  has  now  become  a  bona  fide  public 
question  is  made  evident  by  the  general  interest  on  the  part  of  the  com¬ 
munity  and  by  the  amount  of  time  and  space  given  to  its  serious  discus¬ 
sion  both  in  newspapers  and  in  public  meetings.  The  lack  of  solidarity 
characteristic  of  women  brought  up  in  the  individualistic  home,  the  habit 
of  many  of  them  of  living  partly  on  the  home  and  partly  on  their  own 
earnings,  their  lack  of  skill,  and  the  over  supply  of  labor  which  they 
cause,  have  all  combined  to  increase  the  wage  cutting  that  has  forced 
society  to  face  the  problem  of  a  living  wage  and  the  necessity  of  getting 
working  women  to  organize  and  to  become  conscious  of  themselves  as 
constituting  a  class.  The  efforts  of  the  Woman’s  Trade  Union  League 
to  increase  the  trade  schools  for  girls  and  the  agitation  for  a  minimum 
wage  law  indicate  the  lines  of  attack.10  Unequal  pay  for  men  and  women 
is  something  that  exists  all  along  the  line  except  perhaps  on  the  stage. 
The  most  conspicuous  effort  to  relieve  the  situation  has  been  the  legis¬ 
lation  in  New  York  City  equalizing  the  pay  of  men  and  women  teachers. 

In  the  ethical  field,  too,  the  woman  who  is  in  modern  society  and  yet 
not  of  it,  is  forcing  upon  society  the  need  for  reconstruction  along  finer 
and  subtler  lines  than  can  be  reached  by  legislation.  The  woman  whose 
social  consciousness  is  formed  still  on  the  pattern  of  the  isolated  family 
is  out  of  place  and  a  stumbling  block  to  a  society  that  is  struggling  for 
a  more  inclusive,  more  highly  socialized  consciousness,  and  whose  work¬ 
ing  machinery  is  already  social  on  a  huge  scale.  Society  finds  its  ends 
obstructed  by  the  women  who  do  not  understand  that  they  are  responsi¬ 
ble  as  members  of  a  larger  social  order  as  well  as  of  the  family.  Ibsen, 
over  and  over  again,  presents  this  conflict.  In  An  Enemy  of  the  People , 
when  Dr.  Stockman  decides  to  do  his  duty  to  the  public  at  any  cost, 
the  reaction  of  the  wife  is,  “  But  towards  your  family,  Thomas.  Towards 
us  at  home.  Do  you  think  that  is  doing  your  duty  towards  those  that 
are  dependent  on  you?”  The  woman  tends  not  to  recognize  the  claim 
of  those  beyond  the  family  circle.11  Society  gets  concrete  evidence  of 

mid.,  p.  27. 

10Adams  and  Sumner,  Labor  Pro blems,  Bk.  I,  11;  Louise  Bosworth,  The  Living 
Wage  of  Women  Workers ,  pp.  4-7. 

UW.  I.  Thomas,  Sex  and  Society,  pp.  223-234. 


THE  PROBLEM 


9 


this  in  the  difficulty  of  making  women  understand  that  their  families 
cannot  be  made  exceptions  in  cases  of  quarantine  laws,  other  health 
regulations,  or  rules  of  the  public  schools.  The  attitude  of  the  mother 
is  likely  to  be,  “My  child  must  have  this  or  that  advantage,”  rather  than, 
“All  the  children  in  the  school  should  benefit  by  a  given  improvement.” 
Her  child  must  have  good  light  and  a  seat  that  is  comfortable  even 
though  the  others  do  not.  Brieux  brings  out  a  very  extreme  case  of 
this  kind  in  Damaged  Goods  when  he  makes  Madame  DuPont  quite 
willing  to  break  the  laws,  to  bribe,  to  lie,  to  sacrifice  the  health,  perhaps 
the  life  of  a  wet-nurse  and  her  family,  that  her  diseased  grandchild  may 
have  every  chance  of  recovery.  This  woman’s  sense  of  social  respon¬ 
sibility,  far  from  including  a  lower  social  class,  hardly  extends  beyond  the 
limits  of  her  own  immediate  family.  The  lack  of  respect  for  law  when 
it  conflicts  with  her  ends,  and  the  preponderance  of  the  personal  over 
the  impersonal  in  the  traditional  homebred  woman,  also  come  home 
to  society  when  she  shows  a  tendency  to  cheat  the  impersonal  corpora¬ 
tions  such  as  the  street  car,  railroad,  or  telephone  companies,  to  defraud 
the  government  through  the  customs  house  or  the  tax  collector,  or  to 
express  her  sympathy  for  criminals  in  foolish  gifts. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  invasion  of  women  into  the  regions  beyond 
the  home  has  very  naturally  forced  into  prominence  the  interests  for 
which  women  stand  and  has  brought  into  sharp  relief  the  incompati¬ 
bility  of  business  for  money  only  and  municipal  government  for  politi¬ 
cians,  with  the  ends  which  women  hold  essential — the  welfare  of  children 
and  the  health  and  happiness  of  human  beings.  The  presence  of  women, 
therefore,  in  new  and  manifold  places  is  a  mighty  influence  in  compelling 
society  to  consider  how  the  values  of  the  home  can  be  reconciled  with 
money  making,  power,  and  ambition  as  ends  in  themselves. 

The  new  activity  of  women  is  also  an  agent  in  the  great  movement 
against  prostitution,  one  of  the  means  by  which  society  has  become 
more  and  more  conscious  that  prostitution  must  be  dealt  with  scientifi¬ 
cally  as  one  deals  with  the  great  destructive  forces  of  nature.  Prosti¬ 
tution  is  interrelated  with  almost  every  problem  that  concerns  women, 
(a)  The  lack  of  eugenic  consciousness  and  conscience,  together  with 
ignorance  on  the  part  of  women  concerning  venereal  diseases  and  the 
facts  of  sex,  has  increased  the  production  of  the  unfit,  the  subnormal, 
the  neurotic,  on  whom  prostitution  depends  so  largely  for  its  supply. 
This  alone  forms  a  great  social  problem  which  can  be  reached  only  through 
slow  educational  processes  and  is  being  so  reached.  Men  are,  of  course, 
just  as  responsible  as  women,  but  women  must  be  instructed,  or  there 


10  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

can  be  no  relief,  (b)  As  women  come  to  consciousness,  they  make  it 
very  plain  to  society  that  one  standard  for  men  and  an  outlawed  class  of 
women,  with  another  for  all  the  rest  of  the  women,  is  an  impossible 
situation.  If  men  are  not  able  or  willing  to  accept  the  code  of  physical 
purity  which  they  have  exacted  of  women,  society  as  a  whole  must  work 
out  a  new  standard  for  both,  (c)  The  conditions  under  which  women 
work,  the  barbarous  state  of  domestic  service,  the  fatigue  of  the  long 
working  day  and  unsanitary  surroundings,  the  less  than  living  wage, 
all  tend  to  make  prostitution  a  more  pressing  problem  and  the  question 
of  prostitution  reacts  again  to  send  home  the  need  of  better  conditions 
for  working  women,  (d)  There  is  dawning  upon  the  more  enlightened 
the  thought  that  after  all  prostitution  may  possibly  be  the  logical  corollary 
of  a  marriage  system,  based  not  on  sexual  selection,  but  on  economic 
motives,  and  that  sexual  selection  must  be  given  freer  play  if  prostitu¬ 
tion  is  to  be  wiped  out  and  eugenic  mating  encouraged.  This  means 
a  recognition  of  the  immediate  relation  between  prostitution  and  the 
economic  dependence  of  women  and  a  realization  that,  in  some  way, 
for  the  sake  of  women,  marriage,  and  the  home,  the  economically  inde¬ 
pendent  woman  must  be  made  compatible  with  a  form  of  home  and  of 
marriage  which  is  also  approved  of  by  society.12 

(e)  Prostitution  is  influenced  in  some  degree  also  by  a  number  of 
factors  which  tend  to  make  marriage  later  or  more  difficult,  such  as 
hard  economic  conditions,  the  greater  effort  required  to  support  a  com¬ 
paratively  nonproductive  family,  as  well  as  the  increasing  inclination 
of  women  for  education,  economic  independence,  and  specialized  work 
with  the  accompanying  disinclination  to  take  on  the  restrictions  of 
matrimony.  Life  without  marriage  and  children  has  been  rendered  more 
tolerable  to  women,  thus  enabling  them  to  hold  out  against  their  own 
normal  desires,  by  their  discovery  that  home  and  companionship  are  still 
possible  for  them.  Everywhere  we  find  the  unmarried  woman  turning 
to  other  women,  building  up  with  them  a  real  home,  finding  in  them  the 
sympathy  and  understanding,  the  bond  of  similar  standards  and  values, 
as  well  as  the  same  aesthetic  and  intellectual  interests,  that  are  often 
difficult  of  realization  in  a  husband,  especially  here  in  America,  where 
business  so  frequently  crowds  out  culture.  The  man  who  comes  within 
her  circle  of  possibilities  is  too  often  a  man  who  has  no  form  of  self 
expression  beyond  his  business  and  who,  therefore,  fails  to  meet  her  ideal 

12Havelock  Ellis,  Sex  in  Relation  to  Society ,  VII,  p.  254 — Pt.  Ill,  p.  316;  IV, 
pp.  363,  409,  410;  W.  I.  Thomas,  Sex  and  Society ,  p.  245;  Edward  Carpenter, 
Love's  Coming  of  Age,  p.  8;  Walter  Lippmann,  A  Preface  to  Politics ,  chap.  iv. 


THE  PROBLEM 


11 


of  companionship  in  marriage.  Thus  prostitution  is  strengthened  by 
the  ease  with  which  women  are  able  to  satisfy  in  part  their  needs  for  love 
and  home  while  still  retaining  independence  and  to  feel  that  a  full  life 
is  to  be  lived  even  without  marriage.  One  has  only  to  know  professional 
women,  teachers,  social  workers,  doctors,  nurses,  and  librarians  to  realize 
how  common  and  how  satisfactory  is  this  substitute  for  marriage.  They 
have  worked  out  a  partial  solution  to  their  problem  in  that  they  have 
contrived  to  combine  a  real  home  based  on  love  and  community  of 
interests  with  work  in  the  world,  but  they  have  solved  it  at  the  expense 
of  men  and  children.13 

(f)  Another  aid  to  prostitution  results  from  trying  to  combine  in 
marriage  two  people,  one  of  whom  has  been  brought  up  on  the  principle 
of  absolute  suppression  of  sex  and  horror  of  the  physical;  the  other  of 
whom  has  been  accustomed  from  childhood  to  take  sex  and  the  right 
to  its  physical  expression  as  a  matter  of  course.14  To  the  man  of  such  a 
marriage,  where  he  is  incapable  of  bringing  the  woman  to  his  attitude 
or  of  working  out  a  new  one  acceptable  to  both,  the  prostitute  will  offer 
real  temptation  or  a  natural  solution  of  the  problem.15 

Bound  up  with  the  problem  of  prostitution,  as  well  as  with  every 
other  phase  of  the  woman  problem,  is  the  question  of  divorce,16  which 
is  being  agitated  from  one  end  of  the  country  to  the  other.  Law  makers 
are  urged  to  place  fresh  restrictions  on  the  dissolution  of  marriage, 
with  utter  disregard  of  the  complexity  of  the  influences  bringing  about 
the  increase  of  divorce.  All  the  strains  and  tensions  which  meet  in 
marriage  today  are  part  of  the  divorce  problem.17  All  the  stirrings  and 
awakenings  of  the  feminine  mind,  all  the  difficulties  of  adjusting  the  new 
order  to  the  old,  all  the  economic  problems  in  which  women  are  involved, 
the  revolt  against  a  double  standard  in  morals,  the  growth  of  a  finer, 
higher  standard  for  married  life  on  the  part  of  both  men  and  women, 
the  feeling  of  the  need  for  nicer  adaptations,  greater  unity  of  interest, 
occupation,  view  of  life,  ethical  theory — all  these  growing  demands  on 
marriage  render  divorce  an  inevitable  phenomenon  symptomatic  of 
other  conflicts  and  struggles  for  development. 

13Edward  Carpenter,  The  Intermediate  Sex. 

14M.  R.  Coolidge,  Why  Women  Are  So,  pp.  31,  329,  330. 

16Havelock  Ellis,  Sex  in  Relation  to  Society ,  VII,  pp.  295,  296,  299,  300;  May  Sin¬ 
clair,  The  Helpmate. 

18Special  Reports  of  the  Census  Office:  1867-1906,  Marriage  and  Divorce ,  Part  I, 
pp.  11  ff. 

17Havelock  Ellis,  Sex  in  Relation  to  Society ,  X,  pp.  461,  462,  464;  C.  D.  Wright, 
Increase  of  Divorce  in  the  United  States;  Dewey  and  Tufts,  Ethics ,  chap.  XXVI, 
•6;  2.  p.  603. 


12  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

2.  Typical  Interpretations 

The  mere  bulk  of  the  difficulties  here  presented,  the  fact  that  they 
are  social  as  well  as  personal,  indicates  the  presence  of  real  problems. 
If  all  these  signs  failed,  the  voluminous  literature  on  the  subject  would 
be  sufficient  proof. 

The  older  method  of  attacking  the  question  was  that  of  determining 
from  an  a  priori  consideration  of  the  nature  of  woman,  the  activities, 
mental  and  physical,  for  which  she  is  particularly  fitted.  This  was 
often  found  to  differentiate  women  from  men  along  lines  which  seemed 
to  the  progressive  woman  to  leave  all  the  best  things  in  the  masculine 
division.  The  refutation,  therefore,  has  been  an  effort  to  show  that  all 
these  traits  which  were  thought  to  indicate  inferiority  had  been  acquired 
in  the  course  of  ages  of  social  inheritance.  It  has  been  quite  thoroughly 
explained  that  the  majority  of  the  undesirable  feminine  qualities  are  as 
easily  accounted  for  by  environmental  factors  as  by  physical  heredity, 
so  that  modern  controversialists  usually  take  for  granted  the  possibility 
of  almost  any  kind  of  development  on  the  part  of  the  individual  woman, 
but  they  shift  the  point  of  emphasis  from  the  question  of  woman’s 
capacity  to  that  of  her  inevitable  function. 

One  of  the  more  recent  attempts  to  deal  with  the  woman  question  in 
an  entirely  open-minded  way  throws  around  its  conclusions  the  atmos¬ 
phere  of  scientific  experiment  by  the  use  of  a  mass  of  empirical  data  on 
which  with  evident  sincerity  on  the  part  of  the  writer,  they  are  sup¬ 
posed  to  rest,  but  in  reality  it  adopts  the  form  of  the  older  methods  of 
attack  in  that  it  seeks  to  give  the  traditional  limitations  of  women  an 
a  priori  psychological  basis.  G.  Heymans  in  his  Psychologie  der  Frauen 
presents  a  theory  of  the  difference  between  the  sexes  and  the  conse¬ 
quent  type  of  activity  for  which  each  is  fitted  that  is  supported  by  his 
general  psychological  position  and  its  supposed  agreement  with  a  mass 
of  data  which  he  has  collected  chiefly  by  questionnaires  sent  to  coedu¬ 
cational  schools  and  to  physicians. 

The  argument  on  which  Mr.  Heymans  bases  his  conclusion  of  pro¬ 
nounced  difference  in  mental  traits  of  men  and  women  runs  as  follows: 
emotion  affects  profoundly  and  undesirably  the  other  mental  processes; 
the  average  woman  is  more  emotional  than  the  average  man,  therefore 
the  average  woman  exhibits  to  a  much  greater  degree  the  undesirable 
effects  of  emotion.  Emotion  tends  to  narrow  the  field  of  consciousness 
and  subconsciousness  in  that  it  gives  undue  weight  to  the  emotionally 
toned  ideas  and  shuts  out  the  neutral  or  less  emotionally  toned  ideas  that 
ought  to  be  considered  if  thinking  and  willing  are  to  give  sound  and 


THE  PROBLEM 


13 


well  balanced  results.  The  constant  presence  of  emotional  complexes 
in  the  feminine  consciousness  and  subconsciousness  as  well  as  an  inherent 
tendency  to  narrowed  consciousness  vitiates  to  a  large  extent  all  her 
mental  processes.  Because  of  her  hyperemotionality  she  is  inferior 
to  men  in  the  scientific  realm  where  the  required  analysis  and  abstraction 
are  too  neutral  in  character  to  hold  her  interest;  in  every  field  of  art  her 
achievement  is  less  than  that  of  men,  because  of  her  limitation  to  the 
merely  personal.  Reason,  any  detailed  logical  process,  is  also  quite 
impossible  for  the  average  woman  because  her  emotions  are  hostile  to 
its  dry,  patient  analysis.  Women  excel  only  in  morality  and  in  the 
use  of  intuition,  which  they  substitute  for  logic,  and  their  activities  should 
be  limited  to  the  home,  the  church,  the  sick-bed,  and  practical  philan¬ 
thropy.  In  theory  of  any  kind,  women  may  not  meddle  because  their 
emotions  give  too  strong  a  bias  to  their  thought. 

Mr.  Heymans’  conclusions  are  so  extreme  that  it  would  hardly  be 
worth  our  while  to  criticize  them,  if  it  were  not  that  his  use  of  emotion 
and  intuition  is  so  typical  of  a  common  method  of  approaching  the 
woman  question.  The  point  is,  are  the  problems  in  which  women  find 
themselves  involved  today,  due  merely  or  chiefly  to  certain  peculiar 
mental  characteristics  such  as  emotionality  and  irrationality,  or  is  it 
possible  that  they  are  rather  the  result  of  the  general  social  situation 
and  that,  in  the  light  of  more  modern  psychology,  the  difficulties  raised 
by  Mr.  Heymans’  conception  of  emotion  and  intuition  would  disappear? 
A  more  careful  examination  and  criticism  of  the  two  may  serve  to  clear 
the  matter. 

In  the  first  place,  Mr.  Heymans  is  not  clear  in  his  use  of  the  term 
intuition.  First  he  identifies  intuition  in  woman  with  sensitivity  to 
fine  shades  of  reality  and  the  ability  to  adapt  herself  to  varied  and  complex 
conditions.  He  also  compares  it  to  the  flash  of  insight  which  is  charac¬ 
teristic  of  genius.  Then  he  likens  it  to  the  judgments  or  rather  the 
unconscious  estimates  we  make  in  the  space  world  and  to  the  weather 
predictions  of  old  sailors.  There  seems  to  be  a  confusion  here  of  two 
views :  the  first  regards  intuition  as  that  which  suggests  the  novel  idea, 
the  solution,  the  happy  thought;  the  second  treats  it  as  a  habit  formed 
unconsciously  by  trial  and  error  through  a  long  series  of  similar  experi¬ 
ences  and  applied  without  reflection.  Heymans  seems  finally  to  adopt 
the  second  interpretation;  at  least,  his  statement  of  the  disadvantages  of 
intuition  as  a  mode  of  thought  indicates  as  much,  for  its  great  draw¬ 
back  is  that  it  does  not  fit  the  new  situation,  the  real  problem.  This 
would,  of  course,  be  true  of  space  perceptions  and  weather  predictions. 


14  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OE  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

If  unfamiliar  conditions  were  introduced,  such  as  mountain  regions  for 
plains,  the  old  habits  would  break  down  entirely  or  partially.  But  if 
he  makes  of  intuition  a  habit  formed  and  used  unconsciously,  he  can 
hardly  allow  it  to  account  for  real  insight,  fine  adjustments,  and  the 
appreciation  of  the  subtleties  in  life.  The  former  is,  at  any  rate,  not  the 
intuition  of  genius,  nor  the  intuition  for  which  women  are  so  often  com¬ 
plimented  and  it  is  just  the  new  situation,  the  unaccustomed  complica¬ 
tion,  that  calls  for  this  flash  of  inspiration.  The  difference  between 
this  latter  form  of  intuition  and  logic  would  be  that  intuition  gives  the 
clue  and  logic  carries  it  out  consciously,  tests  the  soundness  of  the  idea. 

It  may  be  then  that  women  incline  to  fail  in  the  patient,  logical 
testing  of  their  ideas  and  prefer  a  blind  trial  and  error  method,  but  in 
neither  use  of  intuition  is  there  to  be  found  a  substitute  for  the  painful 
and  laborious  process  of  thinking,  without  which  nothing  dependable 
can  be  accomplished  and  for  the  loss  of  which  no  amount  of  insidious 
flattery  can  compensate.  Women  may  as  well  face  the  truth,  that,  if 
reason  is  a  sex  limited  character,  all  the  intuition  in  the  world  will  never 
help  them.  They  are  doomed.  Even  the  limited  field  which  Mr.  Hey- 
mans  assigns  to  women  ought  not  to  be  left  to  the  mercy  of  intuition. 
There  is  no  sound  reason  why  the  family,  the  home,  the  sick,  and  the 
poor  should  not  be  handled  with  as  much  rationality  as  possible.  Like¬ 
wise  the  supremacy  in  morality  which  is  so  freely  granted  to  women, 
can  refer  only  to  a  primitive  type  of  morality,  for  woman  in  her  dislike 
of  principles,  laws,  and  abstractions  clings  to  the  concrete  act  and  never 
comes  to  the  point  of  realizing  its  meaning.  Her  morality  is  not  conscious 
morality  and  she  is,  therefore,  on  Mr.  Heymans’  premises,  never  moral 
in  the  full  sense  of  the  word.18 

Emotion  is  as  ambiguously  treated  as  intuition.  There  is  no  definite 
statement  as  to  what  is  meant  by  emotion,  but  one  is  led  to  infer  that 
Mr.  Heymans  adopts  a  position  similar  to  Wundt’s  and  considers  emo¬ 
tion  a  compound  of  elementary  feelings.  He  makes  no  attempt  to 
analyze  any  of  the  emotions  or  to  show  how  the  simple  feelings  are 
combined  in  them,  nor  does  he  indicate  that  emotion  has  any  funda¬ 
mental  connection  with  the  rest  of  consciousness.  It  is  a  sort  of  hanger-on 
of  ideas,  of  no  value  in  particular  and  often  a  great  hindrance.  Some¬ 
times  it  seems  to  be  located  in  the  object  and  he  speaks  of  women  as 
being  interested  only  in  emotionally  colored  objects;  sometimes  it  seems 
to  be  located  in  the  subject  and,  as  they  are  in  a  perpetual  state  of  emo¬ 
tion,  women  are  said  to  throw  a  feeling  tone  about  any  object  they 

18Dewey  and  Tufts,  Ethics ,  p.  179. 


THE  PROBLEM 


15 


'consider.  By  greater  emotionality,  he  means  not  greater  irritability, 
as  Lombroso  insists,  but  the  fact  that  women  do  react  with  real  emotion 
to  weaker  stimuli  than  does  the  average  man  and  react  with  more  intense 
emotion  to  the  same  stimuli.  He  makes  no  difference,  then,  in  the 
quality  of  the  emotion  felt  by  men  or  women  but  seems  to  be  main¬ 
taining  that  women  actually  possess  greater  emotional  capacity,  which 
exhibits  itself  in  a  feeling  response  to  comparatively  insignificant  stimuli 
as  well  as  in  a  more  intense  appreciation  of  the  more  important  ones. 
He  gives  no  basis  in  his  theory  for  regarding  the  emotion  of  women,  qua 
emotion,  as  inferior  to  that  of  men;  there  is  merely  more  of  it.  However, 
he  does  limit  the  emotions  of  women  in  that  he  finds  women  peculiarly 
susceptible  to  certain  kinds  of  emotion.  But  this  he  attributes  in  turn 
to  their  greater  emotionality  which  favors  certain  feelings  and  reduces 
sensitivity  to  others  such  as  the  more  intellectual  and,  therefore,  less 
intense  emotions.  This  vicious  circle  merely  goes  to  show  his  own 
confused  conception  of  emotion. 

Since  emotion  is  practically  the  same  in  character  for  both  sexes 
and  feminine  emotion  need  not  be  treated  under  a  special  heading,  the 
simplest  way  to  avoid  the  unpleasant  consequences  of  Mr.  Heymans’ 
position  is  to  adopt  another,  and,  as  it  seems  to  the  writer,  a  much  more 
satisfactory  view  of  emotion.  If  one  takes  the  standpoint  of  functional 
psychology  and  views  mind  as  the  best  device  for  the  adaptation  of  the 
organism  to  the  environment  that  evolution  has  secured,  then  it  is 
possible  to  organize  consciousness  around  the  act  as  the  center,  and  emo¬ 
tion,  no  less  than  perception  and  reason,  falls  into  its  own  place  and  be¬ 
comes  functional  instead  of  remaining  the  extraneous,  useless,  semi- 
pathological  phenomenon  which  the  older  psychologists  tended  to  make 
of  it.  In  habitual  action  there  is  no  emotion,  but  whenever  consciousness 
is  involved,  there  is  some  degree  of  it  present  as  a  necessary  stage  in  the 
act.  Functional  psychology  explains  emotion  as  the  expression  in  con¬ 
sciousness  of  the  organic  reverberations  that  occur  whenever  two  or 
more  impulses  clash.19  Emotion  is  the  danger  signal,  the  reporter  of 
some  kind  of  tension  in  what  has  been  a  smooth-going  process.  The 
sudden  rush  of  feeling  indicates  the  value  to  the  self  of  the  various 
imperiled  ends,  and  measures  the  importance  of  making  some  kind  of 
adjustment  and  the  relative  weight  which  is  to  be  given  to  the  con¬ 
flicting  impulses.  Reason  comes  in  after  emotion  has  died  down  to 
work  out  in  cold  blood  the  means  whereby  the  ends  indicated  by  emo¬ 
tion  may  yet  be  obtained  and  action  made  possible.  This  removes 
19William  James,  Psychology ,  Vol.  II,  chap.  xxv. 


16  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

the  stigma  from  emotion  as  such,  for  if  it  is  a  factor  in  every  conscious 
act,  lack  of  rationality  detected  in  the  act  cannot  be  laid  at  the  door 
of  emotion.  Emotion  is  not  rational  and  it  has  to  subside  before  reason 
can  operate  effectively,  but  for  instrumental  psychology,  the  two  are 
not  opposed;  they  are  rather  different  stages  with  different  and  equally 
necessary  functions  in  all  conscious  action.20 

Emotion  which  is  not  followed  by  reflection  is  likely  to  end  in  a  futile 
hit-or-miss  response,  but  reason  which  is  not  preceded  by  the  emotional 
evaluation  of  all  the  elements  involved  in  a  problematic  situation,  is 
equally  likely  to  overlook  results  that  ought  to  be  part  of  the  con¬ 
sciously  sought  end.  Failure  to  be  emotionally  sensitive  and  respon¬ 
sive  means  failure  to  see  some  of  the  real  values  at  stake  or  to  take 
account  of  them  in  our  plan  of  action.  The  great  reformer,  the  man  who 
stirs  society  to  the  point  of  doing  something,  is  not  necessarily  a  person 
of  greater  rational  powers  than  many  a  contemporary.  He  only  feels 
more,  that  is,  he  is  more  finely  tuned  emotionally;  he  responds  more 
sensitively  and  detects  values  to  which  other  people  are  blind. 

Such  a  conception  of  emotion  clears  up  the  confusion  which  one 
feels  in  Mr.  Heymans’  use  of  the  term.  At  one  moment  the  impression 
is  given  that  emotion  is  a  mental  state  which  persists  in  women  uncon¬ 
ditionally,  ready  to  attach  itself  equally  to  every  object.  If  this  were 
so,  there  seems  to  be  no  reason  why  it  might  not  as  well  attach  itself  to 
analysis  and  abstraction  as  to  anything  else.  At  another  time,  emotion 
is  a  quality  of  objects  and  women  are  susceptible  only  to  the  emotionally 
colored  stimulus.  If  that  were  the  case,  there  is  no  a  priori  reason  why 
the  concrete  and  the  personal  should  in  themselves  be  more  emotional 
than  the  abstract  and  the  general.  He  has  no  means  of  fixing  emotion 
and  he  runs  into  this  kind  of  a  circle:  women  are  not  scientific  because 
they  feel  no  emotion  for  analysis  and  abstractions  because  of  their 
emotionality.  Part  of  the  difficulty,  too,  is  in  considering  analysis  and 
generalizations  as  ends  in  themselves.  Men  may  enjoy  the  process,  but 
they  are  working  for  some  particular  end  to  which  analysis  and  abstrac¬ 
tion  are  a  means.  If  a  woman  has  a  strong  impulse  in  any  given  direc¬ 
tion,  towards  any  end,  and  that  impulse  is  obstructed,  she  will  feel 
emotion.  The  fact  that  the  removal  of  the  obstacle  involves  analysis 
will  not  prevent  her  from  evaluating  the  end  emotionally,  although  it 
may  prevent  her  from  obtaining  it. 

Analysis  and  abstraction  may  appear  in  any  field  whatsoever,  where 
difficulties  in  action  arise,  and  with  reference  to  any  sort  of  end  or  interest . 

20James  R.  Angell,  Psychology. 


THE  PROBLEM 


17 


Emotion  likewise  appears  in  any  field  when  there  is  an  obstructed  interest, 
and  when  it  functions  properly,  far  from  being  a  hindrance,  it  is  a  stimu¬ 
lus  to  the  analyzing  and  abstracting  that  follows.  The  charge  that  fairly 
might  be  made  is  that  women  have  failed  to  develop  the  reflective 
process  and  that  emotion  with  them  seems  too  often  to  be  just  emotion 
which  does  not  lead  to  any  rationalized  expression.  Certain  ends  are 
emotionally  evaluated  and  the  thought  of  them  as  already  obtained  is 
set  up  in  a  vague,  abstract  way  as  something  highly  desirable  and  some¬ 
thing  which  may  come  to  pass  somewhere,  somehow,  but  there  is  no 
actual  attempt  to  work  out  concrete  means  for  obtaining  the  ends  in 
question.  With  men,  on  the  contrary,  the  emotion  is  much  more  fre¬ 
quently  counterbalanced  by  the  attempt  to  do  something.  The  rational 
part  of  the  process  is  given  its  innings.  The  whole  matter  might  be  put 
this  way:  emotion  appears  to  be  functioning  more  normally  in  men 
than  in  women.  The  history  of  women  offers  reason  enough  for  this 
condition  so  that  there  is  no  need  to  assume  an  inherent  abnormality 
in  women  with  regard  to  the  ordinary  course  of  mental  process.  Any 
theory,  like  that  of  Mr.  Heymans,  which  is  based  on  sex  differentiation 
so  drastic  as  to  forbid  women  ever  to  become  complete  human  beings  and 
thereby  to  render  their  work  in  any  sphere  of  action  ineffective,  is  not 
likely  to  be  received  as  a  solution  until  it  is  forced  upon  us  by  facts  that 
are  unalterable. 

Turning  to  some  of  the  presentations  of  the  woman  question  offered 
by  women  themselves,  we  find  them  agreeing  usually  on  the  welfare 
of  the  child  as  the  determining  factor  but  differing  widely  as  to  the  limita¬ 
tions  this  puts  upon  the  mother.  Four  rather  typical  attitudes  are  repre¬ 
sented  in  the  positions  taken  by  Olive  Schreiner,  an  English  woman, 
Ellen  Key,  a  Swedish  woman,  and  two  American  leaders,  Ida  Tarbell 
and  Charlotte  Perkins  Gilman. 

Olive  Schreiner  presents  the  question  from  the  standpoint  of  useful 
labor  as  essential  to  healthy  life.  She  insists  that  there  must  be  com¬ 
pensation  for  the  contraction  in  the  traditional  field  of  feminine  labor; 
that,  in  addition  to  childbearing,  which  also  tends  to  decrease  as  an 
occupation,  every  woman  ought  to  have  work  that  is  useful  to  society , 
not  only  because  men  are  overburdened,  but  because  women  degenerate 
without  it  and  become  unfit  mothers  of  the  race.  No  restrictions  should 
be  put  upon  the  work  of  women,  since  there  is  no  scientific  basis  as  ye  t 
for  correlating  sex  with  peculiar  aptitudes,  and  since,  if  such  sex  differ¬ 
ences  do  exist,  they  will  adjust  themselves  in  time.  People  do  not 


18  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

persist  for  any  length  of  time  in  doing  that  for  which  they  are  not  fitted 
and  which  others  do  better.  The  only  evident  sex  differentiation  is  in 
connection  with  the  reproductive  process.  From  the  part  the  woman 
plays  in  reproduction  she  does  have  a  different  set  of  experiences,  a 
different  attitude,  and  a  peculiar  interest  in  certain  sets  of  values.  From 
this  fact  it  follows  that,  while  she  will  probably  have  no  special  contri¬ 
bution  to  make  in  the  fields  of  abstract  and  impersonal  labor,  she  will 
bring  to  bear  a  decidedly  different  point  of  view  in  the  handling  of  certain 
social  questions.  For  her  own  development,  she  must  have  her  share 
in  the  common  labor  of  humanity;  for  the  sake  of  the  race,  humanity 
must  have  the  benefit  of  her  peculiar  contribution.  Mrs.  Schreiner 
does  not  show  how  in  the  concrete  case  our  present  form  of  marriage 
and  the  home  is  to  be  adjusted  to  the  present  industrial  system,  although 
she  implies  that  the  woman  who  is  bearing  and  rearing  children  should 
not  have'  other  work  to  do  during  that  period. 

Miss  Tarbell  tries  to  combine  a  reactionary  with  a  progressive  solu¬ 
tion  and  deals  with  the  concrete  rather  than  with  theory.  She  takes 
the  home  and  the  industrial  world  as  they  are  and  finds  that  the  diffi¬ 
culty  lies  in  the  fact  that  women  have  failed  to  grasp  the  possibilities 
of  their  situation.  The  form  of  their  work  has  changed:  they  have 
become  consumers  instead  of  producers,  but  consuming  is  just  as  much  a 
business,  just  as  important  to  society  and  affords  as  much  development 
as  other  work  which  takes  women  beyond  the  home.  The  problems 
which  are  agitating  women  are  largely  illusory;  they  arise  from  the  fact 
that  women,  having  failed  to  see  or  develop  their  own  field,  have  gone 
over  to  the  men’s  and  find  it  impossible  to  combine  men’s  work  success¬ 
fully  with  their  feminine  temperaments  and  maternal  functions.  But 
personal  ambition  and  the  joys  of  individual  freedom  and  independence 
have  too  often  overcome  their  sense  of  duty  to  the  nation  and  they  have 
not  infrequently  decided  for  the  men’s  field  against  marriage  and  mother¬ 
hood. 

Miss  Tarbell  is  on  dangerous  ground  when  she  admits  that  mother¬ 
hood  and  the  present  form  of  marriage  do  involve  sacrifice  of  freedom, 
independence,  and  attractive  work.  The  question  always  arises  whether 
there  is  not  something  wrong  with  marriage,  if  it  does  mean  actual 
sacrifice  of  the  woman.  The  increasing  individualism  of  the  age  is  not 
likely  to  recognize  as  a  duty  an  office  or  function  which  is  admitted  to 
be  a  check  on  the  development  of  the  individual. 

The  particular  work  to  which  women  are  limited,  according  to  Miss 
Tarbell,  is  assigned  by  nature;  that  is,  the  bearing  and  the  rearing  of 


THE  PROBLEM 


19 


children  and  the  making  of  a  home.  Nature  does  not  apparently  object 
to  the  work’s  changing  from  production  to  consumption,  so  long  as  it  is 
carried  on  in  the  home.  Nature  does  not  really  limit  the  work  then,  but 
only  the  place  where  it  may  be  done.  Miss  Tarbell  finds  a  natural  sex 
limit,  however,  in  the  emotional  nature  of  women  which  is  suppressed 
or  killed  in  the  hard  and  complex  dealings  of  business  and  industry. 
The  superior  gift  of  women  lies  in  their  emotional  capacity;  therefore, 
if  this  is  crushed,  they  show  no  peculiar  genius  but  are  usually  mediocre 
when  compared  with  men.  This  amounts  to  saying  that  our  present 
social  organization  outside  of  the  home  does  not  afford  an  environment 
favorable  to  the  best  development  of  women — does  not  get  the  best  they 
have  to  give.  There  would  be  room  here  for  the  question  as  to  the  eternal 
fitness  and  rightness  of  such  a  system,  the  possibilities  of  altering  it  to  suit 
women,  and  the  doubt  as  to  its  being  especially  well  adapted  to  men, 
if  it  has  such  a  deadening  effect  on  the  emotional  life. 

From  Miss  Tarbell’s  point  of  view,  the  woman’s  business  is  to  make 
a  dollar  go  as  far  as  possible,  to  understand  the  markets,  to  be  a  scientific 
housekeeper,  to  solve  her  own  labor  problem — domestic  service — to 
bear  children  and  train  them  into  good  citizens,  or  if  she  has  no  children 
or  has  sent  them  into  the  world,  to  be  responsible  for  the  homeless  child 
and  his  environment.  There  is  no  lack  of  occupacion  in  this  program, 
but  it  leaves  unsolved  the  question  as  to  the  work  for  which  the  unmarried 
woman  shall  be  prepared.  Certainly  training  will  be  required  for  the 
tasks  indicated  above  and  certainly  the  unmarried  woman  will  have  to 
work,  as  long  as  she  remains  unmarried,  at  the  ordinary  work  of  the 
outside  world,  while  many  a  woman  will  be  forced  to  combine  bread¬ 
winning  with  her  maternal  duties.  The  fact  that  the  childless  woman 
ought  to  care  for  the  homeless  child  will  not  provide  her  with  means  to 
do  this  unless  she  too  works  at  a  man’s  job.  Miss  Tarbell  hints  at  the 
desirability  of  keeping  the  daughter  in  the  home  so  far  as  possible  by 
training  her  in  scientific  consuming  so  that  she  saves  enough  in  her  wise 
expenditure  to  pay  her  way.  This,  of  course,  would  hardly  work  after 
all  the  mothers  are  so  thoroughly  trained  that  they  are  already  saving 
every  possible  cent  and  it  would  never  prevent  the  appearance  of  the 
homeless  class  who  must  depend  entirely  on  themselves. 

Economic  dependence,  says  Miss  Tarbell,  is  one  of  the  illusions  agi¬ 
tated  by  the  uneasy  woman.  The  woman  who  takes  up  her  task  in 
marriage  is  performing  work  just  as  useful  and  necessary  to  society 
as  that  for  which  her  husband  is  paid.  She  is  an  economic  dependent 
only  when  she  voluntarily  assumes  that  relationship  and  lets  slip  her 


20  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

end  of  the  business  partnership.  Miss  Tarbell  ignores  the  question 
of  how  much  economic  independence  is  constituted  by  the  value  of  the 
work  actually  done  and  how  much  by  the  recognition  of  that  value  on 
the  part  of  society  in  money  payment.  She  resents  the  attitude  of  women 
like  Mrs.  Gilman  who  think  that  the  world’s  progress  up  to  the  present 
is  chiefly  the  work  of  men,  and  that  women  need  to  take  up  their  share 
in  life.  She  insists  that  there  has  never  been  any  serious  inequality 
in  the  sexes  in  actual  practice  and  that  women  have  suffered  from  no 
graver  injustices  than  men.  “There  has  never  been  any  country, 
at  any  time,  whatever  may  have  been  their  social  limitations  or  political 
disbarments,  that  women  have  not  ranked  with  the  men  in  actual 
capacity  and  achievement.”21  Aside  from  the  fact  that  such  a  state¬ 
ment  needs  detailed  exposition,  it  is  rather  incongruous  in  connection 
with  her  arraignment  of  the  modern  woman  in  the  United  States  as 
having  failed  not  only  in  the  man’s  field  but  in  her  own.  The  modern 
woman,  at  any  rate,  is  inferior  to  the  man,  for,  through  her  ignorance 
of  the  economic  questions  involved  in  consumption,  she  has  helped 
on  the  high  price  of  living,  the  trusts,  graft,  adulterated  food,  and  the 
like;  through  her  neglect  of  her  children,  she  has  raised  up  a  generation 
of  dishonest  politicians,  unscrupulous  business  men,  unpatriotic  citizens; 
through  her  narrowness  and  false  training  she  has  made  dress  a  moral, 
economic,  and  aesthetic  problem  for  the  nation,  and  her  handling  of  domes¬ 
tic  service  has  been  injurious  to  home  and  servant.  If  the  modern 
woman  is  really  guilty  of  all  these  sins,  descendant  though  she  be  of 
the  noble  woman  of  the  past,  a  possible  explanation  might  be  that  she 
has  on  her  hands  an  insoluble  problem  and  consequently  has  been 
unsuccessful  all  around. 

Ellen  Key,  while  she  agrees  with  Mrs.  Gilman  in  many  respects, 
differs  on  what  has  come  to  be  the  center  of  the  conflict.  They  are  at 
one  on  the  necessity  of  economic  independence  at  all  times;  they  coincide 
in  regarding  the  child  as  the  supreme  end  of  all  social  activities,  but  they 
differ  fundamentally  in  what  they  regard  as  the  essential  relation  of 
effective  maternity  to  the  occupations  of  the  mother  and  in  their  general 
attitude  towards  the  meaning  of  sex  for  life.  Mrs.  Gilman  tends  to 
minimize  sex,  to  limit  it  to  the  bare  field  of  reproduction,  and  to  leave 
all  the  rest  of  life  to  that  which  is  common,  social,  higher  than  sex. 
She  also  maintains  that  if  domestic  work  is  to  be  put  on  a  modern  business 
basis,  the  system  which  allows  each  woman  to  manage  all  the  various 
forms  of  it  for  her  own  individual  household  will  have  to  be  replaced  by 

21Ida  Tarbell,  The  Business  of  Being  a  Woman ,  p.  225. 


THE  PROBLEM 


21 


cooperation  and  specialization.  This  would  mean  that  each  woman, 
if  she  worked  at  all,  must  have  a  specialty;  regular  work  which  she  would 
be  obliged  to  combine  with  motherhood  in  place  of  the  heterogeneous 
household  labors  which  she  used  to  combine  with  it.  Ellen  Key,  on  the 
contrary,  with  a  broad  philosophic  attitude,  a  lack  of  dogmatism  and 
sex-antagonism  which  gives  her  a  decided  advantage  over  the  more 
hostile  Mrs.  Gilman,  insists  on  the  final  worth  and  importance  of  sex 
in  its  highly  developed  forms  and  on  the  necessity  of  maintaining  sex 
distinction.  While  she  still  believes  that  the  mother  should  retain 
economic  independence  through  the  state,  she  also  thinks  that  the 
greatest  opportunity  for  a  woman  to  develop  all  the  possibilities  of  her 
personality,  especially  those  qualities  which  are  peculiarly  hers,  lies 
in  her  work  within  the  home;  that  if  she  is  to  function  most  effectively 
she  must  not  try  to  combine  any  profession  or  outside  occupation  with 
motherhood.  She  seems  to  be  influenced  to  this  view  by  several  consid¬ 
erations  :  one,  the  tendency  of  the  modern  industrial  and  business  world 
to  crush  out  the  emotional  life  and  make  a  sexless  creature  out  of  a  sen¬ 
sitive  woman;  another,  which  is  the  positive  side  of  the  same  point,  is 
her  feeling  that  the  spaciousness  of  home  life,  the  absence  of  rules  and 
system,  the  room  it  affords  to  grow  and  live  as  well  as  to  work,  the 
greater  meaning  given  to  its  work  through  the  personal  relations  in¬ 
volved,  all  of  these  promise  a  finer,  better  rounded  self  for  the  woman  who 
casts  her  lot  there;  and,  last  and  most  important  consideration  of  all,  is 
the  need  of  the  child  for  the  education  and  training  that  a  mother  is 
best  fitted  to  give  and  which  in  the  giving  enriches  her  more  than  any 
other  work  she  could  possibly  do. 

Mrs.  Gilman’s  reply  to  this  is  that  a  home  is  still  a  home  even  though 
it  be  separated  from  the  business  of  cooking  and  serving  food,  cleaning, 
laundry  work,  and  the  like.  The  atmosphere  of  the  home  could  be 
maintained  as  well  by  a  mother  who  had  one  particular  kind  of  work 
which  kept  her  away  from  the  home  certain  hours  in  the  day,  as  by  one 
who  worked  for  the  same  number  of  hours  at  cooking  or  cleaning  within 
it.  There  seems  to  be  truth  on  both  sides.  Ellen  Key  emphasizes  the 
tendency  of  the  modern  world  to  crush  its  workers,  to  take  out  of  them 
the  joy  of  life  and  to  deprive  them  of  the  leisure  in  which  to  cultivate 
ideal  interests.  But  this  condition,  if  it  means  ruin  of  womanhood,  is 
surely  not  the  best  environment  for  men.  There  must  be  something 
wrong  with  work  that  unsexes  the  worker.  Mrs.  Gilman  on  the  other 
hand  emphasizes  the  unprogressiveness  of  domestic  economy;  the  waste 
involved  in  maintaining  a  separate  cleaning,  cooking,  and  washing 


22  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OE  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

plant  for  every  individual  family;  the  folly  of  perpetuating  what  must 
necessarily  involve  amateur  service  in  any  department  so  important  as 
food  and  sanitation;  the  wisdom  of  training  each  woman  for  some  kind 
of  expert  service  to  be  exercised  for  many  families  instead  of  half  training 
her  for  amateur  service  in  one  family. 

As  to  the  training  of  the  child  by  the  mother,  it  is  a  question  that, 
could  be  settled  only  by  experiment  and  to  which  many  exceptions  might 
be  found.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Mrs.  Gilman  is  not  making  a  very 
startling  proposal  when  she  advocates  partial  care  of  the  child  by  trained 
nurses  even  in  his  babyhood.  Our  present  educational  system  takes 
the  child  from  his  mother  for  several  hours  a  day  at  least,  beginning  with 
his  fifth  year.  The  children  of  the  wealthy  are  cared  for  a  large  part 
of  the  time  by  trained  nurses.  Unless  the  mother  devoted  her  entire 
time  to  the  baby,  leaving  all  her  duties  of  consumer  and  housekeeper 
to  hired  help,  he  might  very  well  receive  more  time  and  attention  from 
a  nurse  whose  entire  business  it  was  to  give  babies  scientific  care.  If  the 
mother  is  to  be  an  expert  in  child  culture,  is  to  undertake  all  the  education 
and  training  of  her  child,  she  will  have  occupation  enough  without 
attempting  to  be  an  expert  housekeeper  and  buyer.  The  question 
narrows  itself  then  to  the  advisability  of  child  training  by  a  few  specialists 
or  of  attempting  to  make  specialists  of  all  mothers.  Is  it  better  to  put. 
the  child  under  the  supervision  of  the  expert  from  babyhood  for  a  part 
of  the  working  day  and  leave  to  the  mother  the  general  influence  which 
she  is  able  to  bring  to  bear  through  her  personality  as  a  whole,  the 
training  that  is  given  through  love  and  daily  association,  as  is  the  case 
now  after  the  child  enters  the  school;  or,  is  the  mother  love  and  under¬ 
standing  of  the  child  so  superior  in  itself  as  to  compensate  for  lack  of 
special  skill  or  natural  fitness?  Experience  must  give  the  answer  to 
questions  like  these. 

Every  position  here  noted  indicates  a  conviction  either  of  a  lack  in 
woman’s  personality  or  a  lack  of  harmony  between  the  nature  of  woman 
and  the  modern  world,  which  is  unfavorable  to  the  development  of  her 
personality.  Mr.  Heymans  unintentionally  tries  to  prove  that  the 
woman  is  quite  unfit  for  any  share  in  a  civilization  that  has  reached 
the  stage  of  reflective  consciousness.  Miss  Tarbell  emphasizes  the  differ¬ 
ence  between  the  greater  unity  and  restfulness  of  the  personality  of  the 
woman  of  the  past  as  compared  with  the  uneasy  split-up  consciousness 
of  the  modern  woman.  Both  Miss  Tarbell  and  Ellen  Key  point  out  the 
tendency  of  the  world  outside  the  home  to  crush  the  essential  womanli¬ 
ness  of  the  woman,  yet  admit  a  certain  amount  of  sacrifice  of  personal 


THE  PROBLEM 


23 


development  as  necessary  to  the  woman  in  the  home.  Ellen  Key 
recognizes  this  so  keenly  that  she  advocates  minimizing  the  sacrifice 
by  such  means  as  the  vote,  economic  independence  through  motherhood 
pensions,  and  work  at  the  end  of  the  childbearing  period.  Mrs.  Gilman 
lays  greatest  stress  on  the  individualistic  narrowness  of  the  woman  who 
is  confined  to  isolated  home  life  and  the  bad  effects  on  society  of 
the  unscientific  methods  of  feeding,  clothing,  training  a  family  and  keep¬ 
ing  a  house  clean  under  the  regime  of  the  woman  who  is  not  on  a  par 
with  modern  society  intellectually,  while  Olive  Schreiner  gives  a  general 
picture  of  the  dwarfing  of  the  woman’s  personality  in  terms  of  her 
diminishing  usefulness  as  a  worker. 


II.  THE  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OF  THE  LARGER 

SOCIAL  SITUATION 

1.  Personality  and  the  Present  Social  Order 

Such  a  survey  as  we  have  just  made  leaves  little  doubt  as  to  the 
reality  and  seriousness  of  the  chaotic  conditions  of  which  the  “  uneasy 
woman”  complains.  The  bare  fact  that  there  exists  in  society  at  the 
present  moment  a  large  class  of  idle  women;  a  still  larger  class  of  women 
working  in  homes  at  enormous  waste  of  time,  energy,  and  efficiency;  a 
third  and  comparatively  small  class  whose  work,  though  satisfactory, 
is  of  such  a  character  as  to  interfere  with  marriage  if  they  desire  it;  and 
a  fourth  class  whose  work  is  rendering  them  unfit  for  anything  else,  is 
sufficient  evidence  in  itself  that  women  are  not  realizing  themselves 
through  their  social  relations  in  any  complete  or  harmonious  way; 
but  rather  are  buffeted  about  at  the  mercy  of  these  same  social  relations. 
The  selves  which  women  bring  to  bear  upon  the  struggle  seem  to  be 
overwhelmed  by  a  situation  that  is  too  large  for  them.  They  are  con¬ 
trolled  by  these  external  conditions  instead  of  realizing  themselves 
through  them. 

The  case  is  not  different  with  the  modern  man.  The  woman  has  no 
monopoly  on  conflict  and  disharmony.  He,  too,  is  swamped  by  the 
system  in  which  he  finds  himself.  He,  too,  is  being  made,  willy-nilly, 
by  the  relations  in  which  modern  business  and  industry  are  involving 
him;  yet  he  is  not  expressing  himself  consciously  through  these  relations. 
One  has  only  to  recall  the  struggle  between  capital  and  labor,  the  way  in 
which  life  with  its  ideal  interests  is  being  crowded  out  by  the  pressure 
of  the  economic  machinery  not  only  on  the  laborer  but  on  the  man  who 
is  chained  down  to  money-making,  the  frequent  incompatibility  of  home 
and  family  with  the  work  for  which  the  man  is  fitted  by  nature,  the  aliena¬ 
tion  of  the  father  from  his  home  responsibilities  through  lack  of  leisure, 
to  realize  that  the  unsatisfactory  character  of  the  woman’s  life  is  but  a 
conspicuous  part  of  a  wider  and  more  basic  situation  which  involves  men 
as  well. 

This  thesis  is  based  on  the  contention  that  the  incompatibilities  and 
oppositions  sketched  above  are  genuine  and  are  the  particular  expressions 
of  a  more  basic  conflict  existing  between  the  self,  the  personality,  of  the 
modern  man  and  woman,  and  the  present  social  situation  through 
which  this  self  has  not  yet  succeeded  in  expressing  itself  because  it 
is  not  yet  sufficiently  conscious  of  the  social  character  of  that  situation 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OF  LARGER  SOCIAL  SITUATION 


25 


or  of  the  method  through  which  control  can  be  secured.  The  realiza¬ 
tion,  that  we  have  as  yet  no  social  control  and  few  personalities,  either 
masculine  or  feminine,  sufficiently  socialized  to  cope  with  the  modern 
world,  is  being  forced  upon  us  most  conspicuously  in  the  terrific  conflicts 
arising  from  the  indifference  of  the  form  taken  on  by  business  and  in¬ 
dustry  to  the  actual  content  involved.22 

Industry  and  trade,  as  carried  on  in  the  Middle  Ages  within  a  single 
family,  a  small  community,  or  even  in  the  craft  and  merchant  guilds 
of  the  larger  towns,  was  a  social  institution  controlled  to  a  large  extent 
from  within  by  natural  social  impulses.  A  man  had  no  business  relations 
which  did  not  involve  relations  of  an  immediate  personal  character. 
He  was  in  direct  contact  with  the  people  for  whom  he  worked  or  who 
worked  for  him  and  he  had  a  self,  a  personality,  formed  by  these  rela¬ 
tionships  and  adequate  to  them.  The  man  who  made  shoes  depended 
immediately  upon  the  man  who  shaped  iron  at  the  forge  and  exchange 
was  likely  to  be  made  in  kind,  or  the  members  of  a  large,  more  or  less 
isolated  family  produced  among  themselves  all  the  necessaries  of  life. 
Economic  and  intimate  social  relationships  were  inextricably  mingled, 
so  that  even  where  there  was  no  clear  consciousness  of  their  significance, 
there  was  no  danger  of  the  natural  emotional  controls  which  arise  in 
personal  situations  failing  to  operate. 

Modern  business  and  finance,  on  the  other  hand,  has  become  so 
complex,  so  impersonal  and  abstract  in  its  organization  that  it  seems 
to  involve  only  economic  values.  In  form  it  is  purely  economic,  in 
content  it  is  still  as  social  as  ever  it  was  in  the  Middle  Ages.  The  changes 
that  have  brought  all  this  about  have  been  so  tremendous  and  so  sudden, 
the  introduction  of  machinery  and  the  consequent  centralization  and 
systematization  of  industry  have  so  depersonalized  it  that  the  human 
beings  involved  in  it  have  not  yet  had  time  to  develop  personalities  that 
are  equal  to  the  complexity  of  the  system. 

The  world  today  is  confronted  by  this  kind  of  a  problem:  Men  are 
being  forced  to  act  under  enormously  widened  social  conditions  in  which 
their  relationships  to  their  fellows  have  multiplied  increasingly  while 
becoming  correspondingly  difficult  to  perceive  as  social,  because  of  the 
growing  abstractness  of  the  business  medium.  Yet  they  bring  to  this 
enlarged  social  activity  only  the  selves  that  are  formed  on  the  feudal 
pattern — neighborhood,  family  selves  too  narrow  to  respond  socially 
beyond  a  limited  and  obviously  social  circle.  In  the  narrower  personal 
connections,  natural  conflict  of  egoistic  and  social  impulses  furnish  a 
22G.  H.  Mead,  Lectures.  (Unpublished.) 


26  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

rough  control;  in  the  new  and  unrecognized  social  relations,  there  is 
nothing  to  call  up  social  tendencies.  Egoistic  motives  easily  pre¬ 
dominate.  A  man  who  would  as  soon  lose  his  own  life  as  injure  a  child 
he  knew  personally,  can,  without  ever  being  conscious  of  the  fact,  injure 
hundreds  of  children  and  indirectly  an  entire  community  by  feeling  no 
responsibility  for  their  employment  in  his  factory  through  his  superin¬ 
tendents.  The  man  in  the  world  of  business,  therefore,  is  not  constituted 
a  self,  a  person,  a  moral  and  social  agent,  by  the  individuals  at  the  other 
end  of  the  system.  He  does  not  make  their  motives  and  attitudes  a 
part  of  his  consciousness,  thus  bringing  all  the  elements  of  the  situation 
within  his  grasp.  He  uses  his  connections  with  people  for  his  own 
benefit  while  remaining  oblivious  to  their  social  character.  The  maxim 
for  this  procedure  is  “business  is  business.”  The  results  are  social  as 
well  as  economic,  but  only  the  economic  factor  is  recognized  and  con¬ 
sciously  intended.  Hence  we  have  these  unlooked  for  social  elements 
actually  altering  our  civilization  but  absolutely  uncontrolled  because 
external  to  the  consciousness  of  the  individual  or  group  of  individuals 
that  is  responsible  for  them.  This  means  the  loosing  of  a  great  stream 
of  social  activities  which  as  social  are  without  rational  guidance.  No 
control  of  modern  life  is  to  be  hoped  for  short  of  a  complete  consciousness 
of  the  social  character  of  business  and  industry,  and  the  development  of 
a  self  large  enough  to  answer  to  the  new  environment  with  the  sub- 
sitution  of  thoughtful  control  for  the  instinctive  controls  of  personal 
contact. 

In  our  modern  associated  charities  organization  we  have  an  illus¬ 
tration  of  one  attempt  to  substitute  thoughtful  for  emotional  control. 
To  leave  relief  work  to  the  chance  that  suffering  will  make  an  immediate 
appeal  to  some  one’s  sympathy  is  a  method  that  does  not  work  in  such 
complex  social  conditions.  It  leads  to  abuse  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  reliever  and  the  relieved.  So  the  effort  is  made  to  awaken  a  perma¬ 
nent  consciousness  of  social  responsibility  and  obligation  towards  the 
weaker  or  more  unfortunate  members  of  the  community  which  will 
result  in  a  steady,  reliable  relief  fund  managed  in  a  semi-scientific  way 
in  place  of  the  haphazard  and  indiscriminate  giving  that  follows  the 
harrowing  of  one’s  feelings  by  chance  personal  contact  with  pitiful  cases. 
The  system  is  doubtless  far  from  perfect  and  our  theory  may  condemn 
it  altogether  in  time,  but  at  least  it  is  a  thoughtful  application  of  theory 
as  far  as  we  have  acquired  any. 

Similarly,  a  few  department  store  managers  and  factory  owners  have 
awakened  to  the  fact  that  it  is  the  part  of  intelligence  to  recognize  that 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OF  LARGER  SOCIAL  SITUATION 


27 


people  are  factors  in  their  problem  and  that  ignoring  the  human  side 
will  bring  its  own  revenge  in  failure  to  solve  their  own  problem  of  eco¬ 
nomic  efficiency  in  the  management  of  their  business.  The  social  con¬ 
tent  is  constantly  bobbing  up  and  making  trouble.  Employers  are  beginn¬ 
ing  to  realize  that  to  overcome  these  conflicts  they  must  understand  the 
point  of  view  of  their  workers  and  try  to  get  the  workers  to  understand 
theirs, to  make  their  relationship  human  as  well  as  commercial. 

A  similar  conflict  is  in  progress  between  the  form  of  the  family, 
which  is  still  feudal  and  individualistic,  and  the  content,  which  is  as 
widely  social  as  society  itself.  Men  and  women  have  tried  to  believe 
that  the  family  has  not  changed  through  the  centuries,  that  it  is  still 
the  self-centered,  self-supporting,  well-nigh  independent  unit  of  mediaeval 
times,  that  within  its  limits  are  produced  the  necessities  of  life  so  that 
the  least  change  in  its  form  would  mean  death  and  destruction  to  its 
members.  The  content  of  the  family  has  always  been  recognized  to 
be  social  but  there  is  marked  blindness  to  the  actual  range  of  its  social 
relations.  They  are  still  conceived  of  as  limited  more  or  less  to  its 
immediate  members.  Just  as  society  has  ignored  the  fact  that  business 
has  any  content  but  money-making,  so  it  has  maintained  its  belief  in 
the  family  as  a  sacred  and  unchanged  institution.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
the  family  has  undergone  a  complete  revolution  of  all  its  activities  and 
its  center  of  gravity  has  been  shifted  to  the  factory,  the  brewery,  the 
bakery,  the  delicatessen  shop,  the  school,  the  kindergarten,  the  depart¬ 
ment  store,  the  municipal  department  of  health  and  sanitation,  the 
hospital,  the  library,  the  social  centers  and  playgrounds,  and  dozens  of 
other  similar  institutions,  while  the  control  over  the  activities  represented 
has  likewise  departed  to  the  outer  world.  Far  from  being  an  independent 
unit,  the  family  exists  by  virtue  of  its  relations  to  these  social  organiza¬ 
tions,  it  is  formed  by  them  and  in  turn  reacts  upon  them,  but  the  cry  of 
“  heresy,”  “sacrilege,”  goes  up  whenever  anyone  suggests  that  an  intel¬ 
ligent  appreciation  of  the  change  in  the  content  of  the  family  might 
result  in  a  more  suitable  form  since  no  amount  of  superstitious  worship 
is  going  to  restore  the  mediaeval  situation. 

Just  what,  then,  is  to  be  expected  in  the  case  of  the  average  woman 
whose  only  recognized  environment  is  the  home?  Logically,  she  must 
be  the  kind  of  self  that  answers  to  the  form  of  the  family.  Just  in  so 
far  as  society  has  been  able  to  preserve  the  feudal  family,  it  has  also 
succeeded  in  preserving  the  feudal  woman  and  until  within  the  last 
few  years  all  women  have  been  theoretically  of  the  feudal  type.  The 
feudal  lady  was  the  center  of  activity  in  her  household  which  included 


28  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

a  small  community.  She  was  the  great  producer  and  knew  personally 
every  handmaid,  farmer,  herd  boy,  or  retainer  who  assisted  her  in 
keeping  her  family  clothed,  housed,  and  fed.  Her  personality  was 
organized  on  the  basis  of  all  these  relationships,  none  of  which  were 
abstract  or  impersonal,  even  though  they  were  not  yet  reflectively  con¬ 
scious.  As  far  as  they  went  these  connections  were  all  real  and  effective. 
She  responded  actively  to  all  of  them  just  because  they  lay  within  her 
control.  She  was  mistress  of  the  situation,  a  working  part  of  the  social 
scheme  in  which  she  found  herself. 

How  does  she  compare  with  the  modern  woman  in  the  home?  There 
is  supposed  to  be  no  difference  except  that  producing  is  replaced  by  con¬ 
suming.  But  just  this  change  makes  the  fundamental  difference  of 
connecting  the  modern  woman  with  a  new  world  of  production,  increasing 
her  relationship  to  outside  institutions,  infinitely,  and  at  the  same  time 
depriving  her  of  any  effective  control  over  her  own  actions.  How  can 
an  individual  woman  exert  any  essential  control  over  consumption 
while  production  is  in  the  power  of  a  huge  system  managed  collectively?23 
It  is  useless  to  ask  women  to  try  to  express  themselves  through  their 
work  as  consumers  so  long  as  they  stand  alone  outside  the  system  in 
which  production  takes  place  and  without  the  technique  through  which 
it  is  controlled. 

It  is  the  same  with  all  of  the  woman’s  interests.  She  may  satisfy 
the  emotional  side  in  love  for  her  family,  but  that  love  will  not  find  any 
complete,  active,  and  intelligent  expression  except  as  she  is  enabled  to 
exert  an  influence  through  organized  society.  Just  the  fact  that  she 
loves  her  husband  and  children  will  give  her  as  an  individual  no  measure 
of  control  over  the  environment  that  surrounds  them.  The  home  is 
no  longer  individualistic  and  the  control  over  its  interests  is  no  longer 
within  the  power  of  the  individualistic  woman.  Unless  she  becomes 
an  active  member  of  the  larger  social  order  and  adopts  its  socialized 
technique,  she  must  be  content  to  be  battered  this  way  and  that  by 
social  forces  which  are  external  to  her. 

In  terms  of  self-consciousness,  the  woman,  like  the  man,  is  not  as 
large  as  the  situation  in  which  she  acts,  or  exists  passively.  The  rela¬ 
tions  of  the  family  to  the  larger  social  institutions  are  accepted  in  a 
perfectly  abstract  way.  No  work  that  she  could  take  up  outside  the  home 
would  be  more  impersonal  so  far  as  recognized  social  content  is  con¬ 
cerned  than  her  occupation  as  consumer.  She  treats  it  as  purely  eco¬ 
nomic,  oblivious  of  the  part  played  by  human  beings  at  the  other  end  of 
23Walter  Lippmann,  Drift  and  Mastery,  chap.  iv. 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OF  LARGER  SOCIAL  SITUATION 


29 


the  transaction.  She  is  buying  for  her  family  and  in  that  sense  what  she 
does  has  meaning  for  her,  but  she  is  quite  unaware  that  her  act  is  social 
also  in  its  effect  on  the  producer,  the  middleman,  and  other  consumers. 
Even  so  the  factory  girl  finds  her  work  social  in  the  sense  that  it  helps 
to  keep  her  family  together  in  comfort.  She  works  for  them,  but  she 
has  no  idea  that  her  work  has  any  other  social  value.  It  is  just  business. 

The  woman  in  the  home,  then,  as  well  as  the  man  in  the  world, 
has  not  a  conscious  self  built  up  with  reference  to  all  the  social  relations 
by  which  she  is  affected  and  through  which  she  in  turn  affects  society. 
The  chief  difference  is  that  the  man  does  have  some  control  since  he  has 
learned  the  power  of  organization  and  cooperation  and  can  express 
himself  through  the  ballot,  whereas  the  woman,  even  if  she  were  to  become 
socially  conscious,  would  be  at  the  mercy  of  the  machine  until  she  had 
acquired  modern  methods  of  expression. 

On  the  formal  side,  the  woman  lacks  social  technique;  on  the  content 
side,  she  lacks  a  socialized  self.  Neither  is  effective  without  the  other, 
as  man  has  proved  in  using  a  social  technique  which  did  not  develop 
out  of  a  social  self.  In  relation  to  her  immediate  family,  the  woman’s 
attitude  is  social  but  not  widely  social  enough  to  correspond  to  the 
methods  she  would  have  to  use  if  that  attitude  gained  a  socialized 
expression;  that  is,  in  order  to  make  effective  her  plans  for  her  own 
children,  she  would  have  to  combine  with  other  people  and  socialize  her 
ends  so  as  to  include  the  welfare  of  their  children.  Her  self  would  neces¬ 
sarily  be  such  as  to  respond  to  the  interests  of  all  children,  to  under¬ 
stand  the  attitude  of  all  fathers  and  mothers.  If  she  adopted  the 
social  technique  only  and  used  just  enough  of  her  understanding  of  other 
people’s  motives  to  bring  about  purely  selfish  ends,  instead  of  working 
for  an  end  which  really  represented  the  interests  of  all  concerned,  she 
would  have  ignored  a  vital  element  in  her  problem  and  sooner  or  later 
the  solution  which  she  had  made  for  herself  would  break  down. 

On  the  other  hand,  with  regard  to  her  economic  relations  to  society, 
she  has  neither  effective  social  technique  nor  social  consciousness  of  any 
kind.  There  is  nothing  in  her  business  dealings  with  store  or  factory 
to  call  out  instinctive  social  attitudes,  to  awaken  her  conscience  or 
restrain  her  egoism.  When  she  patronizes  the  bargain  counter  or  the 
cut-rate  butcher,  she  does  not  realize  that  what  seems  to  her  purely  an 
advantageous  business  transaction  is  a  social  affair;  that  her  acts  are 
affecting  other  people  and  will  in  turn  react  upon  herself  and  family. 
She  feels  no  responsibility  for  the  trust  or  the  sweatshop,  and  as  an 
isolated  individual  she  is  not  responsible  since  she  is  not  free  and  has 
no  power  to  change  conditions. 


30  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  EROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

It  is  this  last  point  which  shows  us  why  the  modern  woman  is  in  worse 
straits  than  the  modern  man.  The  woman  because  she  is  allowed  to 
remain  passive,  because  she  has  no  part  in  the  system  through  which 
some  control  is  possible,  develops  no  sense  of  responsibility  for  any 
of  the  results  which  accrue.  She  takes  good  and  bad  with  the  same 
absence  of  any  positive  grip  on  the  situation.  She  may  avail  herself  in  a 
small  selfish  way  of  any  advantages  which  the  system  brings,  but  she 
makes  no  attempt  to  exploit  these  seemingly  abstract  relations  on  a 
large  scale  for  her  own  gain  as  men  do.  Passivity  is  the  keynote  of  her 
existence  because  society  has  striven  to  keep  the  form  of  the  home  and  the 
woman  in  it  as  they  were  in  the  Middle  Ages  even  after  the  transforma¬ 
tion  that  came  with  the  industrial  revolution. 

The  woman  can  never  become  a  full-fledged,  rational  human  being, 
nor  can  she  be  held  responsible  for  any  of  the  conditions  in  modern  life 
until  society  ceases  to  consider  it  essential  to  womanliness  that  she 
receive  passively  the  impact  of  all  the  currents  of  present-day  organized 
existence.  As  long  as  woman  has  no  part  in  directing  the  forces  which 
determine  the  family,  herself,  the  least  detail  of  her  domestic  life,  society 
is  retaining  the  lady  of  chivalry  at  the  expense  of  conscious  motherhood 
and  is  encouraging  the  immediate  impulsive  reactions  of  the  simple 
situation  at  the  price  of  deliberate  reflection  and  social  consciousness 
which  alone  are  effective  under  the  complex  conditions  of  today.  Just 
as  the  great  labor  movement  is  trying  to  bring  the  laborer  to  conscious¬ 
ness  of  his  needs  and  possibilities,  and  society  to  awareness  of  the  advan¬ 
tage  of  conscious  labor,  so  the  woman  movement  has  before  it  a  two¬ 
fold  task:  first,  to  make  women  conscious  of  their  relations  to  a  social 
order,  second,  to  show  society  its  need  of  conscious  womanhood. 

2.  The  Twofold  Conflict  in  Lives  of  Women 

Woman’s  position  today  is  more  difficult  than  man’s  because  she 
is  peculiarly  involved  in  a  double  conflict:  first,  the  conflict  of  the  smaller 
self  with  the  enlarged  social  environment,  second,  the  conflict  of  the 
methods,  standards,  values  of  the  mediaeval  world,  preserved  particu¬ 
larly  through  the  woman  and  the  home,  with  the  methods,  standards, 
and  values  dominating  the  modern  world  and  the  man  within  it.  He 
cannot  live  in  the  world  his  new  economic  organization  has  created  and 
maintain  actively  the  attitudes  of  the  mediaeval  system,  but  he  likes  to 
think  these  are  still  kept  alive  in  woman  and  the  home  just  as  he  likes 
to  preserve  different  species  of  animals  which  are  becoming  extinct  under 
civilization.  The  difficulties  begin  when  his  industrial  system  will 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OF  LARGER  SOCIAL  SITUATION 


31 


not  allow  women  to  remain  in  the  home  and  they  are  forced  to  attempt 
the  task  which  the  man  has  long  since  abandoned  of  reconciling  the 
two  sets  of  attitudes,  since  there  is  no  class  to  whose  shoulders  they  can 
shift  the  task  of  keeping  alive  the  traditions  of  the  older  world. 

The  first  of  these  conflicts  as  the  fundamental  one  in  which  men  and 
women  are  equally  involved  is  less  likely  to  be  recognized  for  what 
it  is  although  it  supplies,  in  the  writer’s  opinion,  the  final  justification 
of  the  woman  movement  as  well  as  of  socialism;  but  the  second  con¬ 
flict  is  so  obvious  and  so  disastrous  in  its  results,  the  standards  and 
methods  of  the  Middle  Ages  are  so  evidently  incompatible  with  the 
standards  and  methods  of  the  modem  world,  that  it  is  usually  the  one 
seized  upon  by  feminists  as  the  ground  of  the  need  of  the  woman  move¬ 
ment  and  is  likewise  the  one  picked  out  by  anti-feminists  as  the  basis 
for  most  of  the  opposition.  It  really  amounts  to  this,  that  the  woman 
movement  is  opposed  on  the  same  ground  that  is  used  to  check  every 
change  in  the  social  order — loss  of  values.  People  are  afraid  to  let 
their  values  be  tampered  with,  and,  in  this  case,  having  identified  women 
from  the  beginning  of  time  with  sex  and  family,  they  dread,  in  any 
alteration  in  the  family  or  the  woman’s  activities  within  it,  the  possible 
injury  to  contents  which  are  of  supreme  worth  to  humanity.  This  is 
only  right  and  wise  as  a  measure  of  protection  against  sudden  changes 
that  tend  to  let  drop  values  too  precious  to  be  lost,  and  any  theories  which 
the  woman  movement  advances  will  have  to  meet  that  test,  will  have  to 
make  clear  that  what  they  propose  will  either  increase  human  values  or 
at  least  not  sacrifice  any  of  them. 

The  resistance  and  prejudice  which  the  most  necessary  and  beneficial 
alterations  in  the  established  form  of  society  have  to  meet  is,  however, 
largely  instinctive  and  irrational  and  is  merely  part  of  the  general  diffi¬ 
culty  which  attends  the  personal  as  contrasted  with  the  nonpersonal 
problem.  A  question  involving  personal  relations  is  so  much  less  objec¬ 
tive,  so  hard  to  isolate  because  of  the  manifold  elements  that  enter 
into  it,  so  difficult  to  subject  to  the  test  of  experiment,  so  bound  up  with 
the  emotions  and  the  very  innermost  core  of  the  self,  that  only  a  highly 
developed  form  of  consciousness  can  hope  to  hold  the  personal  problem 
away  from  itself  long  enough  to  subject  it  to  analysis  and  objective 
consideration  as  it  long  ago  succeeded  in  treating  the  nonpersonal 
problems  of  the  physical  world.  The  social  sciences,  then,  in  the  very 
nature  of  their  subject  matter  would  be  expected  to  lag  behind  the 
physical  sciences  in  coming  to  consciousness  of  their  methods  and  in 
getting  control  of  their  material,  particularly  in  cases  where  the  central 


32  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

problem  of  sex,  the  most  complex  and  intimate  of  all,  is  concerned; 
while  the  natural  tendency  of  the  human  mind  to  identify  form  with 
value  and  to  attribute  to  the  unchanged  form  the  very  possibility  of 
the  continued  existence  of  value  would  show  itself  peculiarly  stubborn 
with  regard  to  woman  bound  up  as  she  is  with  the  sex  life.  There  is 
a  curious  paradox  in  the  fact  that  human  beings  who  believe  firmly  in 
the  evolution  of  physical  forms  cling  instinctively  to  the  notion  of  a 
given  social  form  as  something  which  must  remain  fixed  since  its  persist¬ 
ence  is  the  only  tangible  evidence  that  the  value  it  represents  is  being 
maintained.  Worth,  satisfaction,  is  not  seen  or  touched,  but  only  felt. 
How,  then,  shall  one  be  sure  it  will  not  escape  unless  the  forms  in  which 
it  lodges  be  kept  intact?  However,  neither  the  system  of  the  philosopher 
nor  the  fears  of  the  plain  man  can  make  a  static  world  out  of  one  whose 
essence  is  change.  In  looking  back  we  are  continually  reminded  of 
forms  that  once  seemed  essential  to  satisfaction  but  have  long  since 
been  replaced  by  new  forms  better  suited  to  the  growing  content,  answer¬ 
ing  to  the  old,  yet  embodying  new  and  richer  values.  We  can  also 
point  out  instances  where  society  clung  to  the  form  after  the  content 
which  possessed  the  value  had  slipped  away,  lost  temporarily  or  per¬ 
sisting  in  unacknowledged  forms  under  other  names.  The  Greeks  had 
such  an  experience  when  in  their  zeal  to  safeguard  the  joys  of  the  hearth 
and  the  ancient  purity  of  woman,  they  so  isolated  and  dwarfed  her 
that  she  failed  to  be  interesting  to  her  cultured  husband.  He  was 
no  longer  able  to  find  joy  or  satisfaction  in  the  marital  relationship. 
The  Greek  lady  had  ceased  to  be  the  kind  of  person  who  could  charm 
him  and  he  satisfied  his  desires  in  the  brilliant  prostitution  or  the  roman¬ 
tic  attachments  to  young  men  which  characterized  the  most  flourishing 
period  of  Greek  civilization.  Normal  sex  values  disappeared  tempo¬ 
rarily  to  a  considerable  extent  because  of  insistence  on  a  particular  form 
which  destroyed  instead  of  preserving  the  relation  which  was  the  real 
source  of  value.  Similarly,  the  emphasis  of  the  church  on  the  marriage 
ceremony  as  the  one  form  through  which  the  relations  between  the  sexes 
can  be  expressed,  has  tended  to  create  the  feeling  that  the  form  of  mar¬ 
riage  is  the  essential  factor  and  sufficient  in  itself  to  insure  the  worth  of 
the  content.  So  convinced  are  many  people  of  the  inherent  value  of 
the  form  of  marriage  that  they  even  desire  laws  to  prevent  the  disso¬ 
lution  of  a  marriage  which  has  lost  all  the  content  that  made  it  sacred 
or  beautiful  to  the  man  and  woman  concerned.  Even  the  worth  of  a 
child  is  not  clearly  differentiated  from  the  form  of  connection  existing 
between  its  parents,  as  is  apparent  in  the  efforts  required  to  get  recogni¬ 
tion  and  protection  for  illegitimate  children. 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OF  LARGER  SOCIAL  SITUATION 


33 


Thus  human  nature  holds  fast  to  the  old  and  tried  forms  and  is 
destined  to  see  good  more  clearly  in  the  past  than  in  the  future.  There 
has  never  been  a  Golden  Age  in  the  Now  and  Here,  and  the  Good  we 
have  let  slip  could  be  recovered  only  if  we  were  to  go  back  to  the  ancient 
forms  that  held  it.  Hence  we  find  a  Rousseau  urging  a  return  to  a  state 
of  nature  whose  simplicity  will  bring  back  the  purity,  the  sincerity, 
and  the  primitive  worth  of  human  relations. 

Likewise,  the  modern  world,  struggling  to  keep  what  was  most 
precious  in  the  Middle  Ages,  has  tried  to  make  women  and  the  home 
the  vehicle  by  which  to  carry  over  into  the  present  the  chivalry  of  men, 
the  piety,  industry,  and  self-sacrifice  of  women,  the  unity  of  the  family, 
which  were  enjoyed  under  the  forms  of  the  feudal  period.  The  altera¬ 
tion  in  industry  that  came  with  machinery  and  the  factory  system 
annihilated  all  obvious  social  content  that  had  been  part  and  parcel 
of  life  in  the  guild  and  in  the  household  system.  This  new  form  looked 
very  bare  and  impersonal,  stripped,  as  it  seemed,  of  all  but  economic 
interests.  Even  the  work  had  less  in  it  for  the  individual  workman, 
when,  instead  of  producing  a  whole  article,  he  made  only  a  small  part  of 
it.  Government,  too,  when  contrasted  with  the  bonds  of  personal 
loyalty  and  the  sense  of  protection  and  responsibility  that  held  between 
lords  and  retainers,  kings  and  knights,  was  a  cold  affair,  little  fitted  to 
kindle  the  warm  emotional  response  that  is  given  to  a  person  to  whom 
one  owes  allegiance.  With  the  overthrow  of  the  great  mediaeval  church 
much  that  was  rich  and  concrete  and  personal,  much  of  color  and  glow 
died  out.  Protestantism  was  a  bit  stern  and  colorless,  although  it  sym¬ 
bolized  a  principle  of  ultimate  worth  to  the  free  individual.  With  so 
much  that  had  made  life  full  and  beautiful  slipping  away,  it  is  small 
wonder  that  the  world  held  fast  to  the  lady  of  chivalry  and  the  mistress 
of  the  household. 

There  is  a  belief  that  by  keeping  the  home  as  nearly  as  possible  in  its 
isolated  individualistic  form  and  holding  the  woman  within  it  to  go 
through  the  motions  of  her  ancient  activities,  the  values  of  the  feudal 
family  and  the  virtues  of  feudal  womanhood  will  be  maintained  uncor¬ 
rupted  by  the  world  outside.  Women,  in  response  to  this  demand, 
have  striven  valiantly  to  make  themselves  exponents  of  all  the  virtues 
that  humanity  feared  to  lose  and  of  which  they  were  popularly  supposed 
to  be  the  carriers.  But  since  a  virtue  is  only  a  name  for  an  efficient 
and  approved  way  of  acting  in  a  given  social  environment  and  since 
the  virtues  required  of  women  were  ways  of  behaving  in  a  feudal  situa¬ 
tion,  the  result  has  been  that  women  have  retained  them  only  as  ab- 


34  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

stractions.  Virtue  has  its  being  in  action,  yet  no  effective  action  is 
possible  when  one  is  confined  to  certain  set  forms  which  have  no  organic 
relation  to  the  conditions  under  which  action  must  take  place.  One 
cannot  act  virtuously  while  ignoring  all  the  factors  that  make  up  the 
background  of  the  action,  for  one’s  act  will  then  be  entirely  irrelevant. 
No  virtue  in  woman  excited  so  much  praise  as  her  industry,  particularly 
her  gifts  as  a  spinner  and  weaver  of  cloth;  but  if  industry  means  some¬ 
thing  more  than  just  being  busy,  if  it  means  intelligent,  useful  occupa¬ 
tion,  then  it  is  vain  to  expect  the  modern  woman  to  be  industrious  as 
the  feudal  woman  was  within  the  limits  of  her  home.  The  woman 
who  tries  to  fill  her  time  with  just  the  housework  that  is  left  to  the  modern 
home  is  too  often  manufacturing  work  that  were  better  left  undone  and 
is  certainly  wasting  time  and  getting  indifferent  results  when  compared 
with  the  skilled  and  expert  work  that  is  done  under  the  methods  of 
specialization  and  organization  used  by  men. 

Charity  is  another  of  the  ancient  virtues  of  women  which  is  today 
the  bane  of  the  scientific  social  worker.  The  woman  who  wishes  to  be 
truly  charitable  will  have  to  go  out  of  her  home  and  her  private  life 
either  to  make  a  study  of  conditions  herself  or  to  join  the  organizations 
which  are  making  such  a  study.  Chastity,  too,  has  become  an  empty 
form  now  that  we  have  become  conscious  of  the  social  responsibility 
for  prostitution.  No  woman  can  possess  chastity  as  an  active  quality 
who  is  not  informed  on  the  facts  of  sex  and  helping  to  give  other  women 
and  all  children  the  chance  to  retain  their  purity. 

What  has  been  asked  of  women  for  the  last  century  is  that  they  in 
some  fashion  embody  virtues  which  are  nothing  but  abstract  universals. 
Woman  must  either  be  virtueless  because  she  is  forced  to  be  negative 
and  therefore  positively  injurious  to  society,  or  she  must  be  not  only 
permitted  but  aided  and  encouraged  to  work  out  in  new  forms  effective 
and  approved  ways  of  acting  with  reference  to  the  actual  situation  in 
which  she  finds  herself,  forms  which  will  possess  a  real  content  to  be 
valued.  What  women  must  seek  if  they  are  to  fulfil  the  spirit  of  society’s 
demands  is  selves  that  respond  to  the  social  values  in  the  seemingly  im¬ 
personal  relations  of  the  home  to  the  wider  community  just  as  they  have 
responded  in  the  past  to  the  more  limited  social  values  of  the  feudal 
household.  In  the  reflectively  conscious  woman,  men  will  find  not  only 
the  content  they  feared  to  lose  but  an  infinitely  enriched  content;  new 
values  not  experienced  before;  the  same  woman  but  with  a  larger,  sweeter 
self,  more  charitable,  more  understanding,  just  because  she  is  able  to 
represent  sympathetically  the  interests  of  so  many  more  people,  just 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  AS  PART  OE  LARGER  SOCIAL  SITUATION 


35 


because  she  is  an  active  center  of  so  many  more  vital  relations,  just  be¬ 
cause  she  is  mother  to  all  humanity  and  her  power  to  love  and  protect 
is  infinitely  enlarged  since  her  self  is  now  as  large  as  her  world. 

The  continued  existence  of  the  values  centering  in  women  and  the 
family  depend,  therefore,  first,  on  an  adjustment  of  the  external  condi¬ 
tions,  a  change  in  the  form  of  the  home  and  in  the  methods  of  the  indus¬ 
trial  world  such  that  the  man  and  the  woman  may  pass  freely  from  the 
one  to  the  other  without  such  violent  changes  of  attitude  as  to  disrupt 
the  harmony  of  the  self  and  render  the  personality  necessarily  incon¬ 
sistent,  but  ultimately  and  essentially,  on  the  passing  of  women  from 
the  individualistic  family  self  to  the  self  that  corresponds  to  this  wider, 
more  complex  society  of  which  it  must  form  a  more  or  less  conscious 
and  active  part.  The  degree  of  social  consciousness  which  humanity 
shall  be  able  to  attain  depends  directly  on  the  number  of  individuals 
who  succeed  in  becoming  conscious  of  the  full  meaning  of  all  their  social 
relations,  who  recognize  to  the  full  their  dependence  on  a  social  situation 
for  the  form  of  self  they  develop,  and  who  increasingly  multiply  the 
number  of  social  attitudes  or  selves  which  they  are  capable  of  main¬ 
taining  towards  these  complex  relationships.  When  a  majority  of  the 
members  of  a  society  become  thus  socially  conscious,  we  shall  have  con¬ 
ditions  favorable  for  the  control  of  social  problems  since  all  the  elements 
involved  will  be  explicitly  present  in  the  consciousness  of  the  majority 
of  individuals.  But  this  stage  of  social  development  can  never  be 
reached  as  long  as  any  large  class  of  people,  such  as  its  women,  are 
permitted,  encouraged,  or  forced  to  exist  in  an  unreal  world  wilfully 
maintained  for  that  purpose.  Nor  will  the  selves  of  men,  in  so  far  as 
they  are  formed  by  their  relations  to  women,  ever  reach  the  full  possi¬ 
bilities  of  selfhood  while  women  remain  only  partially  self-conscious. 


III.  A  SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  THE  SELF  AS  THE  GROUND  OF 

THE  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 


The  clash  of  home  and  outer  world  which  so  disturbs  the  feminine 
mind  today,  as  well  as  the  struggle  of  labor  and  capital,  might  be  avoided 
to  a  large  extent  by  mere  change  in  the  external  working  conditions,  by  a 
lessening  of  the  hours  of  labor,  by  a  minimum  wage,  by  improved  hous¬ 
ing  and  sanitation,  by  a  scientific  cooperative  housekeeping.  But 
in  the  last  analysis,  the  basic  conflict  on  whose  solution  even  the  improve¬ 
ment  of  external  conditions  depends,  the  conflict  between  the  narrow 
self  and  the  wide  social  environment,  can  be  adjusted  only  on  the  sup¬ 
position  that  personality  or  selfhood  is  made,  not  born,  and  that  a  less 
conscious  form  of  personality  may  evolve  into  a  more  conscious  form 
under  conditions  which  are  neither  mysterious  nor  absolute  but  can  be 
understood  and  made  use  of.  The  criticisms  and  analyses  of  the  modern 
woman  which  we  have  examined  all  point  to  a  personality  inadequate 
to  the  life  into  which  social  and  economic  changes  have  plunged  her. 
If  the  crux  of  the  matter  lies  here,  the  fundamental  purpose  of  the 
woman  movement  must  be  to  correct  this  state  of  affairs  by  helping  to 
bring  into  being  a  more  conscious  womanhood  and  by  arousing  society 
to  an  awareness  of  its  need  for  such  a  womanhood.  To  believe  that  this 
is  possible  is  to  imply  certain  things  about  the  nature  of  selves,  person¬ 
ality,  or  self-consciousness  (the  terms  are  used  interchangeably  in  this 
discussion).  If  we  conceive  of  the  self  as  something  which  is  given, 
static,  present  from  the  beginning  both  in  the  individual  and  the  race, 
or,  what  is  practically  the  same  thing,  as  something  which  develops 
absolutely,  reaching  its  full  growth  regardless  of  any  known  condi¬ 
tions,  then  we  have  put  the  self  outside  of  our  own  world,  have  made  it 
mysterious  and  unknowable,  and  by  so  doing  have  given  up  the  hope 
of  social  reconstruction,  for  there  is  no  reconstruction  of  society  without 
a  reconstruction  of  selves.  We  can  get  no  hold  on  a  self  that  is  static 
nor  on  one  that  develops  absolutely.  If  social  problems  are  ever  to  be 
solved  like  other  problems  in  our  world,  selves  must  be  thought  of  as 
existing  in  grades  and  degrees,  evolving  gradually  in  the  individual  and 
in  the  race,  with  certain  definite  conditions  of  growth  which  can  be 
discovered  and  used.  When  we  understand  how  consciousness  develops 
into  more  and  more  adequate  forms,  then  we  have  turned  our  once 
mysterious  and  unknown  phenomenon  into  yielding,  pliable  material 
for  a  genuine  social  science.  Control  of  physical  objects  was  impossi- 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  37 


ble  as  long  as  physical  facts  were  accepted  as  fixed,  mysterious,  or  abso¬ 
lute.  Just  so,  social  control  is  impossible  as  long  as  the  self  remains 
an  unknown  quantity. 

If  the  knowability  of  the  self  is  assumed,  there  follows  the  necessity 
of  indicating  at  least  the  type  of  condition  which  determines  its  appear¬ 
ance  and  growth  as  we  should  do  in  the  case  of  the  physical  fact.24  There 
would  seem  to  be  a  clue  in  the  very  general  tendency  of  modern  thought 
to  conceive  of  the  self  as  social  in  character.25  The  relation  between 
ego  and  alter  is  quite  generally  recognized  as  essential  by  philosophers, 
sociologists,  and  psychologists  alike,  yet,  even  such  thinkers  as  Royce 
and  Baldwin,  who  have  done  so  much  to  show  the  dependence  of  the  self 
on  other  selves,  assume  a  consciousness  of  self  arising,  first  of  its  own  ac¬ 
cord,  i.  e.,  absolutely,  and  then  projecting  itself  into  others  who  there¬ 
upon  are  perceived  as  selves  likewise. 

This  is  to  make  the  self  social  in  name  only.  It  remains  just  as  mys¬ 
terious  and  unapproachable  as  before.  There  is  no  real  interdependence 
of  self  and  other.  To  escape  from  the  absolute  self,  to  make  the  self 
genuinely  social  and  thus  to  keep  it  within  the  range  of  possible  social 
control,  we  are  convinced  that  we  must  take  the  final  step  proposed 
by  Professor  Mead  of  conceiving  the  self  to  appear  and  develop  as  the 
result  of  its  relations  to  other  selves.  We  must  postulate  a  social  environ¬ 
ment  as  an  absolute  prerequisite  for  consciousness  of  self  and  assume 
that  the  self  thus  developed  continues  to  take  on  more  highly  conscious 
forms  according  to  the  increasing  extent  and  complexity  of  the  social 
relations  which  it  actively  maintains.26  According  to  such  a  theory,  it 
is  the  necessity  of  dealing  with  a  social  environment  that  brings  the 
normal  human  being  to  a  consciousness  of  himself  as  over  against  other 
selves.  The  self  which  he  acquires  must,  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  be  no 
richer  nor  more  complex  than  the  other  selves  in  relation  to  which  it 

24No  attempt  is  made  in  this  thesis  to  present  a  theory  of  personality.  The  writer 
merely  wishes  to  indicate  the  type  of  theory  that  seems  to  her  to  be  essential  for  a 
solution  of  the  existing  conflicts.  For  a  consistent  and  detailed  statement  of  such  a 
theory  see  later  references  to  articles  by  Professor  George  H.  Mead. 

^William  James,  Psychology ,  chapter  on  Self;  J.  M.  Baldwin ,  Mental  Development; 
C.  H.  Cooley,  Human  Nature  and  the  Social  Order;  Josiah  Royce,  Psychology ,  chap, 
xii;  Studies  in  Good  and  Evil ,  chaps,  vi,  vii,  viii. 

^George  Mead,  “What  Social  Objects  Must  Psychology  Presuppose?”  Journal 
of  Philosophy ,  Psychology  and  Scientific  Methods,  1910,  Vol.  VII,  pp.  170-180;  I  he 
Mechanism  of  the  Social  Consciousness,”  ibid.,  Vol.  IX,  No.  15,  1912,  Social  Con¬ 
sciousness  and  the  Consciousness  of  Meaning,”  Psychological  Bulletin ,  Vol.  VII,  pp. 
397-405. 


38 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 


is  formed  and  developed.  Physical  environment  alone  is  incapable 
of  supplying  the  kind  of  stimulus  requisite  for  calling  out  the  social 
reaction  and  it  is  just  through  the  social  attitude  that  the  human  being 
finally  becomes  aware  of  himself.  In  dealing  with  inanimate  objects 
attention  can  safely  confine  itself  to  the  object;  there  is  no  necessity 
of  the  agent’s  being  aware  of  his  own  attitude  towards  it.  Attention 
is  naturally  at  home  with  the  stimulus  and  unless  it  is  compelled  by  some¬ 
thing  in  the  situation  to  turn  in  upon  the  subject  it  tends  to  remain 
there.  The  necessity  on  the  part  of  the  subject  of  becoming  aware 
of  his  own  responses  as  such,  arises  in  dealing  with  the  social  object. 
Only  when  one  human  being  is  acting  as  stimulus  to  another  have  we  a 
situation  where  the  behavior  of  the  agent  must  in  time  become  as  impor¬ 
tant  for  attention  as  the  changes  in  the  social  object  to  which  he  is  react¬ 
ing,  for  only  in  such  a  case  does  his  own  act  determine  the  stimulus  to 
which  he  will  have  to  respond.  The  man  who  survives  in  a  social  group 
must  attend  to  the  form  of  his  act  sufficiently  to  know  what  effect  it  will 
have  on  the  person  towards  whom  it  is  directed;  that  is,  his  own  act 
must  take  on  for  him  a  meaning  in  terms  of  the  sort  of  reaction  it  is 
likely  to  call  out  in  the  other  and  he  must  be  able  to  interpret  and  antici¬ 
pate  the  response  of  the  other  in  the  earliest  stages,  while  it  is  still  mere 
gesture  or  attitude,  in  terms  of  the  action  he  must  make  in  reply. 

In  just  this  sort  of  interaction  of  selves  are  found  the  common  roots 
of  self-consciousness  and  consciousness  of  meaning.  Both  require  a 
situation  in  which  attention  is  forced  to  the  side  of  the  response  and  in 
which  two  attitudes  are  necessarily  held  in  suspense  within  one  mind,  a 
proposed  action  of  the  agent  and  the  probable  response  of  another  or 
others  into  whose  place  the  agent  is  able  to  put  himself  in  imagination.  It 
is  this  necessity  for  playing  many  parts,  for  building  up  and  taking  over 
the  selves  of  others,  that  gives  the  individual  the  basis  for  his  own  con¬ 
sciousness  of  self  and  it  is  the  connecting  of  his  own  suspended  act  with  the 
attitude  of  the  other  by  means  of  some  gesture  which  represents  it  that 
he  gets  his  first  grip  on  meaning. 

The  earliest  and  most  imperative  demand  for  the  child  is  that  he 
shall  adjust  himself  to  social  objects.  His  knowledge  of  himself  is  not 
nearly  as  important  for  him  as  his  knowledge  of  the  adults  around  him 
on  whom  he  depends  for  survival.  He  must  be  able  to  put  himself  in 
their  places,  to  take  on  their  attitudes,  to  play  their  parts,  to  get  enough 
of  an  idea  of  them  as  persons  that  he  may  in  a  measure  anticipate  their 
responses  to  his  own  acts.  All  this  necessarily  precedes  his  discovery  of 
himself  and  conditions  it.  Take  as  an  illustration  the  case  of  a  child 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 


39 


who  reaches  for  the  largest  piece  of  cake  at  a  party.  The  action  is  a 
perfectly  natural  one  and  there  is  no  innate  reason  why  it  should  be 
restrained.  But  the  child  is  not  an  isolated  being,  he  has  been  brought 
up  within  a  family  circle  where  father  and  mother  have  taught  him 
that  taking  the  largest  piece  is  wrong  and  selfish.  As  the  child  instinc¬ 
tively  starts  to  take  the  cake,  there  may  come  a  check  in  the  sudden 
realization  of  what  his  mother’s  attitude  would  be.  This  may  be  sym¬ 
bolized  in  his  own  mind  by  a  visual  image  of  her  frown  or  by  words  of 
reproof  that  she  has  used.  Whatever  the  content  of  consciousness,  it 
serves  as  a  symbol  for  his  inhibited  action;  that  is,  he  gets  a  conscious¬ 
ness  of  meaning  and  momentarily  he  takes  on  the  self  of  his  mother  and 
feels  her  disapproval  of  the  act  he  was  about  to  perform.  If  he  had  rushed 
into  action  with  no  inhibition,  there  would  have  been  no  chance  for  con¬ 
sciousness  of  meaning  or  awareness  of  self,  but  in  holding  on  to  the  two 
attitudes,  his  own  instinctive  one  and  the  opposing  attitude  of  his  mother, 
he  experiences  the  sort  of  tension  and  contrast  that  leads  him  to  feel 
one  of  the  attitudes  as  his.  The  emotion  aroused  by  the  thwarted 
desire  has  time  to  be  felt  as  his  emotion  and  the  very  fact  that  he  has  a 
symbol  which  enables  him  to  keep  his  action  in  the  attitude  stage  gives 
him  the  prerequisites  for  the  meaning  relation.  He  may  feel  that  he  is 
one  with  his  impulsive  tendency  and  in  that  case  the  self  of  his  mother 
will  be  set  over  against  him  as  an  other,  but  if  he  is  a  very  well  trained 
child  he  may  identify  himself  with  the  mother  attitude.  In  the  latter 
case,  he  becomes  a  new  self  looking  with  scorn  upon  that  other  self 
which  would  have  been  guilty  of  such  an  act.  In  either  case,  his  sense 
of  self  is  constituted  and  enlarged  by  this  taking  on  of  the  ideally  con¬ 
structed  self  of  another. 

Consciousness  of  meaning,  then,  and  consciousness  of  self  are  possible 
only  as  one  first  builds  up  a  consciousness  of  the  meaning  and  selves 
of  others  to  whom  one  must  respond  relevantly  in  order  to  maintain 
existence.  To  become  conscious  of  self  is  to  become  conscious  of  one’s 
attitudes,  that  is  of  the  meaning  of  the  act  one  does  not  carry  out  and 
of  the  emotion  that  accompanies  it  as  one’s  own.  The  individual  is 
enabled  to  do  this  only  by  first  becoming  aware  of  the  attitudes  of  those 
about  him  and  transferring  them  in  turn  to  himself  as  interpretations 
of  his  own  actions  and  their  probable  effect  on  others.  The  meaning 
of  his  own  acts  comes  to  him  in  terms  of  the  social  reactions  they  call  out. 
The  condition  of  attaining  to  self-consciousness  is,  therefore,  a  social 
environment,  and  the  degree  of  complexity  or  the  completeness  of  self- 
consciousness  attained  will  vary  with  the  complexity  of  the  social  organi- 


40  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

zation  of  which  it  is  a  part.  A  simple  form  of  society  with  simple  prob¬ 
lems  in  which  necessary  social  attitudes  are  comparatively  few, 
unorganized,  and  simple,  will  build  up  undifferentiated,  narrow,  selves 
whose  meanings  and  emotions  are  limited  to  a  narrow  range  of  objects 
and  which  are  not  highly  conscious  of  those  meanings  as  peculiarly  a 
part  of  the  self. 

Out  of  this  background  of  social  interaction  and  dependent  upon  it, 
reflective  consciousness  is  evolved,  from  the  first  grasp  on  meaning  that 
comes  with  the  use  of  symbols,  through  the  gradually  acquired  skill  in 
the  analysis  of  the  static  nonpersonal  object,  to  the  point  where  analysis 
is  turned  upon  the  thinking  process  itself.  At  this  point,  thought 
recognizes  the  part  it  has  played  in  constructing  the  very  object  which 
thus  far  it  had  only  analyzed.  Now,  consciousness  not  only  reflects, 
it  understands  the  method  of  its  reflection  and  thereby  gains  its  control 
over  the  physical  environment.  But  all  this  appears  to  be  an  abstract 
process  and  is  so  considered.  Its  social  character  and  its  relation  to 
concrete  personality  are  for  the  most  part  ignored.  Here  we  have  a 
purely  intellectual  form  with  a  perfectly  definite  though  unacknowl¬ 
edged  social  content;  a  process  that  is  constituted  by  the  relations  between 
human  beings  and  that  is  one  with  the  very  process  whereby  personality 
is  built  up.  As  long  as  the  intellectual  side  of  the  self  remains  in  this 
abstract  form,  control  of  the  nonpersonal  object  may  be  perfected;  but 
the  final  goal  will  be  reached  only  when,  through  recognition  of  the  social 
character  of  these  seemingly  abstract,  intellectual  systems,  the  process  by 
means  of  which  the  self  comes  into  being  and  develops  is  also  recognized 
and  personality  takes  its  place  in  the  mobile,  reconstructable  world. 
What  really  happens  is,  not  samuch  that  we  gain  a  new  control  over  the 
social  object  as  distinct  from  the  physical,  as  that  all  objects  are  seen 
to  be  social  and  subject  to  the  same  sort  of  control  that  hitherto  has  been 
limited  to  physical,  or  at  least  to  nonpersonal  objects  and  systems. 

The  discovery  of  the  social  character  of  even  the  intellectual  processes 
and  the  relation  of  these  processes  to  the  building  up  of  a  self  gives  a 
breadth  and  comprehensiveness  to  personality  that  it  has  never  before 
attained  in  history.  At  a  very  early  period  it  is  possible  for  conscious¬ 
ness  to  take  on  the  form  of  a  self  through  building  up  the  selves  around  it 
and  playing  various  parts  without  having  reached  the  point  where  it  is 
capable  of  subjecting  to  analysis  the  self  thus  attained.  It  is  also 
possible  for  consciousness  to  advance  to  the  stage  where  it  can  turn  in 
upon  itself  and  dissect  the  self  in  a  highly  sophisticated  way  without 
even  then  realizing  that  it  is  part  of  a  social  process  and  that  its  intel- 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 


41 


lectual  activities,  however  expressed,  are  just  as  much  a  part  of  the  per¬ 
sonality  and  just  as  social  as  the  feelings  or  the  will.  The  final  step  of 
seeing  the  self  as  a  process  whose  law  can  be  stated  and  of  finding  in  the 
self  and  in  all  social  relations  material  that  admits  of  reconstruction  and 
scientific  handling,  just  as  in  the  case  of  supposedly  nonsocial  objects  and 
relations,  marks  the  highest  point  of  growth  in  self-consciousness  as  yet 
developed  in  our  experience. 

All  this  is  not  to  deny  that  the  human  mind  supplies  an  element  which 
must  always  be  an  unknown  quantity,  that  after  all  it  is  the  potentiality 
which  is  capable  of  developing  self-consciousness,  but  it  is  to  say  that 
the  material  which  this  potentiality  requires  for  its  unfolding  is  social 
in  character.  When  external  conditions  change  the  sweep  and  nature 
of  social  relations  so  rapidly  that  the  social  character  of  many  of  them  is 
obscured  for  the  time  being,  it  will  be  possible  to  get  a  situation  such  as 
we  have  outlined  in  the  preceding  section,  where  the  individual  has  not 
yet  caught  up  with  his  enlarged  environment,  is  using  social  relation¬ 
ships  in  a  purely  mechanical  way,  and  is  not  constituted  a  self  by  them, 
and  where  the  only  cure  for  the  disorder  and  unrest  thus  produced  lies 
in  the  possibility  of  the  individual’s  finally  waking  up  to  the  social 
character  of  the  new  connections  and  building  up  another  and  more 
perfectly  conscious  self  to  correspond.  Reform,  even  of  external  con¬ 
ditions,  must  receive  its  impulse  from  selves  that  have  become  reflec¬ 
tively  self-conscious  to  the  point  of  realizing  the  social  nature  of  the 
apparently  abstract  relations  which  are  crushing  the  individuals  at  the 
other  end  of  them  and  of  deliberately  assuming  towards  these  relations 
a  personal  attitude. 

It  is  evident  that  such  a  theory  of  self-consciousness  implies  a  positive 
difference  in  the  type  of  personality  that  it  is  possible  to  develop  at  differ¬ 
ent  periods  in  history.  Not  that  great  personalities  are  not  to  be  found 
in  every  period,  but  it  nevertheless  remains  true  that  the  individual  or 
the  society  that  is  conscious  of  the  method  by  which  personality  is 
built  up  and  is  aware  of  the  social  content  of  all  activities  and  all  systems 
has  the  power  to  go  farther  in  realizing  all  the  possibilities  of  personality 
than  the  individual  or  the  society  which  is  unconscious  of  these  implica¬ 
tions.  With  the  former,  the  process  is  controlled  and  voluntary;  with 
the  latter,  it  is  necessarily  haphazard  because  it  is  only  partially  con¬ 
scious.27  Just  how  far  the  individual  shall  go,  then,  in  the  direction 
of  reflectively  conscious  personality  cannot  rest  entirely  with  him  or  his 
own  genius  but  must  depend  to  a  large  extent  on  the  period  in  which  he 
27Dewey  and  Tufts,  Ethics ,  chap,  xviii. 


42  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

lives.  The  process  in  time,  which  through  increasingly  complex  social 
conditions  and  accumulated  experiences  finally  forces  the  individual 
into  the  center  of  the  stage  yet  ultimately  connects  him  once  more  with 
his  fellows,  is  a  very  gradual  and  prolonged  affair,  but  whoever  is  born  in 
the  later  stages  gets  the  benefit  of  all  that  has  preceded.  The  intro¬ 
spective  attitude  which  was  slowly  and  painfully  acquired  by  the  race, 
the  power  to  analyze  process  and  method  as  well  as  objects,  which  came 
only  after  centuries  of  conflict  and  effort  at  adjustment,  can  be  gained 
easily  today  in  part  of  the  individual’s  lifetime  because  he  is  born  into  a 
world  where  scientific  method  is  an  established  habit.  In  the  attainment 
of  personality  as  in  the  pursuit  of  science,  the  individual  stands  today 
on  the  shoulders  of  past  generations  and  may  begin  where  they  left  off. 

Only  on  such  a  basis  is  there  any  happy  outcome  to  be  looked  for  in 
the  conflicts  between  the  individual  and  society  which  are  overwhelming 
us  today.  If  the  Greek  philosopher,  or  the  mediaeval  lord,  or  even  the 
thinker  of  the  Kantian  period  reached  the  limit  of  human  development 
in  the  direction  of  self-consciousness,  then  there  can  be  no  salvation 
for  us.  Nothing  short  of  the  birth  of  a  new  man  with  a  higher  type  of 
personality  can  offer  a  solution  for  the  social  evil,  the  woman  problem, 
child  labor,  and  industrial  slavery.  History  shows  that  this  is  not 
only  possible  but  actual.  We  are,  in  fact,  seeing  the  birth  of  a  new  type 
of  consciousness  as  far  in  advance  of  the  consciousness  of  the  period  of 
the  French  Revolution  as  that  was  in  advance  of  Greek  consciousness 
at  its  best. 

It  is,  of  course,  not  possible  to  indicate  perfectly  differentiated  and 
isolated  levels  of  consciousness  in  history.  One  period  melts  into 
another.  The  later  development  is  foreshadowed  in  the  earlier  and  the 
earlier  is  present  in  and  alongside  of  the  later,  but  it  is  possible  to  point 
out  in  a  general  way,  at  least,  three  fairly  distinct  and  characteristic 
stages  in  the  development  of  consciousness  of  self  appearing  within  the 
historical  period.  There  is  first  the  type  of  consciousness  wdiich  we 
shall  designate  by  the  term  objective  consciousness  of  self ,  which  colors 
Greek  life  and  thought,  although  with  the  Greeks  and  through  the 
Middle  Ages  it  is  already  in  the  process  of  evolving  into  the  second  stage, 
which  may  be  labeled  subjective  consciousness  of  self,  and  reaches  its 
climax  in  Kant  and  the  personalities  of  the  French  Revolution.  Lastly 
comes  what  we  have  termed  the  period  of  reflective  or  social  consciousness 
of  self  which  is  just  now  making  its  appearance  and  is  indicated  in  the 
tremendous  increase  of  social  responsibility  and  awakening  of  social 
consciousness  in  all  classes  and  countries.  Although  a  great  European 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 


43 


war  is  still  a  possibility  for  our  civilization,  the  attitude  of  public  opinion 
towards  such  a  war,  at  least  in  this  country  and  Britain,  could  hardly 
have  been  comprehended  a  century  ago,  so  greatly  have  our  feelings  of 
common  brotherhood  and  interdependence  increased  and  extended. 

Greek  consciousness,  even  at  its  best,  illustrates  the  objective  charac¬ 
ter  of  the  earlier  forms  of  self.  It  deals  marvelously  well  with  the  world 
of  objects  and  ideas.  It  is  at  ease  with  universals,  with  truth,  reality, 
beauty,  virtue,  all  located  in  an  external  world,  but  it  is  never  quite 
fully  aware  of  itself  and  its  own  importance.  The  Greek  thinker  was 
eternally  seeking  truth,  wisdom,  and  reality  but  he  seldom  thought  of 
looking  for  them  within.  Their  validity  would  necessarily  lie  in  their 
independence  and  objectivity.  So  strong  is  this  tendency  of  earlier 
Greek  thinkers  to  find  truth  only  in  the  objective  that  when  they  did 
begin  to  turn  analysis  towards  the  subjective  and  to  discover  the  relation 
of  the  individual  mind  to  the  objective  world,  they  felt  themselves  to 
be  destroying  objective  validity,  for  recognizing  the  part  played  by  the 
private  experience  of  the  person  usually  meant  for  them  a  giving  up  of  the 
universal,  hence  the  real,  and  ended  in  scepticism.  The  bottom  seemed 
to  drop  out  of  reality  for  the  Greeks  when  they  were  forced  to  admit 
the  part  taken  by  the  particular  mind  in  knowledge.  To  prevent  this 
fatal  result,  they  often  removed  the  stigma  of  particularity  and  rein¬ 
stated  the  universal  by  making  the  rational  element  in  the  individual 
not  a  personal  or  private  affair  but  part  of  the  world  reason.  The  Greek 
type  of  self,  therefore,  tended  to  become  a  split  up  metaphysical  object, 
made  up  of  the  various  absolute  qualities  in  which  it  shared,  and  valued 
for  their  sake.  Personality  was  not  a  supreme  category  for  the  Greeks 
as  it  is  for  us,  nor  was  the  individual  necessarily  conceived  of  as  having 
certain  inherent  rights  and  value  just  because  he  was  a  human  being. 

It  was  possible  in  consequence  for  the  Greeks  to  present  as  ideal  the 
high-minded  man  of  Aristotle28  who  not  only  may  but  even  must  ignore 
entire  classes  of  people  because  they  are  supposed  to  have  no  share, 
or  a  very  small  share,  in  the  universal  qualities  which  give  the  self  its 
worth  and  reality.  Despite  the  fact  that  Aristotle  calls  man  “  a  political 
animal”  and  recognizes  in  a  measure  his  innate  social  impulses,  his  state 
leaves  mechanics,  artisans,  husbandmen,  slaves,29  children,  and  even 
women,30  as  alien,  unassimilated  elements,  lacking  in  virtue  almost 
entirely  or  else  possessing  a  subordinate  variety  quite  different  from  that 

nThe  Nicomachean  Ethics ,  Bk.  IV. 

29 Politics ,  Bk.  IV,  chap.  ix. 

80 Politics ,  Bk.  I,  chap.  xiii. 


44  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

of  the  real  citizens.  “The  only  parts  of  the  state  in  the  strict  sense  are 
the  soldiery  and  the  deliberative  class.”  “The  citizens  ought  not  to  lead 
a  mechanical  or  commercial  life;  for  such  a  life  is  ignoble  and  opposed  to 
virtue.”  With  such  a  theory  and  such  a  state  it  is  made  impossible 
from  the  start  that  the  finest  and  most  highly  developed  person  in  it 
could  ever  become  conscious  of  more  than  a  very  limited  number  of 
social  relations,  for  his  relations  to  all  the  working  classes  are  held  to  be 
abstract,  necessary,  it  is  true,  but  not  implying  any  social  connection. 
Ability  to  put  himself  in  the  place  of  the  artisan,  to  feel  sympathy  for 
his  ends,  would  imply  a  lowering  of  his  own  standard  of  virtue.  There 
could  never  be,  by  any  possibility,  real  community  or  feeling  of  social 
dependence  between  them.  Likewise,  with  his  domestic  relations. 
There  is  no  reciprocity  of  relationship  between  him  and  his  wife  and 
children.  It  is  a  one-sided  affair,  dependence  on  the  one  side,  authority 
on  the  other.  They  are  formed  by  him  but  he  is  not  formed  by  them. 
They  depend  on  him,  he  is  independent  of  them.  We  cannot  conceive 
of  him  as  attempting  to  look  at  any  question  from  the  child’s  or  the  wife’s 
point  of  view,  however  much  it  concerned  them,  or  of  feeling  that  it  was 
as  important  for  him  to  be  able  to  put  himself  in  their  places  as  for  them 
to  understand  him,  because  to  do  so  would  be  to  assume  a  less  rational, 
less  virtuous  attitude  with  which  he  could  have  nothing  in  common  as 
long  as  he  maintained  his  own  superior  character. 

Plato,  on  the  other  hand,  one  would  say  at  first  thought,  surely  was 
a  modern.  There  are  very  few  of  our  up-to-date  theories  that  are  not 
suggested  in  the  Dialogues.  Plato’s  treatment  of  the  position  of  women 
is  startlingly  advanced.  He  makes  very  little  sex  distinction  in  work 
and  education.  Women  stand  on  an  equal  footing  with  men  in  the 
Republic  as  far  as  their  innate  abilities  permit.  Plato,  nevertheless, 
illustrates  the  failure  of  the  Greek  mind  to  appreciate  the  meaning  and 
value  of  personality,  to  estimate  properly  the  innate  worth  of  the  individu¬ 
al,  much  less  to  comprehend  the  essential  character  of  social  relationships. 
Women,  as  a  sex,  it  is  true,  are  not  slighted  in  the  scheme  of  Plato,  but 
human  beings,  men  and  women  alike,  are  disregarded.  The  citizen, 
first  of  all,  exists  for  the  republic  not  the  republic  for  the  citizen.  Again 
the  reality  lies  in  the  universal,  the  idea  of  the  state.  Beyond  Greece, 
moreover,  are  only  the  barbarians.  The  essential  connection  with  other 
races  is  not  yet  felt  or  understood.  They  are  merely  not  Hellenes  and  exist 
chiefly  for  purposes  of  war.  So  with  the  lower  classes.  While  Plato 
does  not  explicity  exclude  them  from  citizenship  as  does  Aristotle,  he 
ignores  them.  They  form  no  part  in  the  consciousness  of  the  guardian 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 


45 


or  warrior  class.  Social  divisions  are  cut  and  dried,  classes  are  distinct. 
Relations  are  external  and  artificial  and  not  based  on  mutual  interests 
and  understanding  of  each  other’s  attitudes  and  desires.  The  socialized 
person  would  have  been  an  impossibility  in  Plato’s  Republic,  nor,  had 
he  existed,  would  he  have  been  considered  a  desirable  citizen.  Jowett 
sums  it  all  up  when  he  says  of  the  Republic:  “The  citizens,  as  in  other 
Hellenic  states,  democratic  as  well  as  aristocratic,  are  really  an  upper 
class,  for  although  no  mention  is  made  of  slaves,  the  lower  classes  are 
allowed  to  fade  away  into  the  distance  and  are  represented  in  the  indi¬ 
vidual  by  the  passions.  Plato  has  no  idea  either  of  a  social  state  in  which 
all  classes  are  harmonized,  or  of  a  federation  of  the  world  in  which  all 
nations  have  a  place.”31  A  personality  developed  under  such  conditions 
could  never  come  up  to  our  ideal  of  the  wise  man  whose  ability  to  take 
on  the  attitude  of  many  people  and  classes  of  people  enables  him  to 
bring  together  within  one  consciousness  all  the  various  points  of  view, 
all  the  impulses  and  tendencies  that  have  to  be  considered  if  a  satisfactory 
solution  for  social  problems  is  to  be  reached,  and  furnishes  him  with  the 
background  requisite  for  a  real  judgment  on  the  problem  in  question; 
the  man  for  whom  all  relations  are  social,  even  the  most  abstract,  and 
for  whom  no  social  relation,  however  familiar  or  habitual,  is  without 
need  of  perpetual  reflection  and  reconstruction;  the  man  whose  self 
includes  so  many  and  such  varied  “others,”  and  who  is  so  aware  of  his 
dependence  on  these  “others,”  that  it  is  impossible  for  him  to  act  without 
reference  to  them. 

At  a  period  of  history  where  the  first  level  of  consciousness  predomi¬ 
nates,  where  truth,  reality,  and  order,  so  far  as  valid,  lie  outside  the  con¬ 
sciousness  of  the  individual,  where  the  individual’s  thinking  has  no 
power  over  the  real,  and  ideals  and  standards  are  of  no  value  unless 
given  apart  from  human  agency,  control  must  of  necessity  be  external. 
Authority  comes  from  without,  as  in  the  case  of  the  child,  in  the  shape 
of  custom,  law,  ideas,  religion,  the  Logos.  If  this  extraneous  authority 
breaks  down  under  criticism  and  there  is  nothing  at  hand  to  substitute, 
chaos  ensues.  All  human  beings  must  have  gone  through  this  stage, 
phylogenetically  and  ontogenetically.  But  at  any  level  of  racial  history 
there  will  always  be  found  some  individuals  who  never  pass  beyond  the 
childlike  condition,  for  whom  authority  must  always  be  external,  and  to 
whom  complete  self-consciousness  never  comes.  Moreover,  women  as  a 
class  are  likely  to  remain  at  this  level  longer  than  men,  since  they  are  sub¬ 
ject  to  a  twofold  restraint:  that  by  which  men  are  bound,  and  the  author- 
nDialogues  of  Plato ,  Jowett,  3d  ed.,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  clxxii. 


46  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

ity  of  husbands  and  fathers  as  well.  Their  activities  and  social  relations 
in  consequence  are  doubly  restricted. 

Transition  from  the  first  to  the  second  level  of  consciousness  begins 
to  be  very  apparent  in  Greek  life  when  the  breaking  down  of  the  social 
fabric  turns  the  attention  of  men  from  the  state,  which  no  longer  offers 
a  refuge  and  an  ideal,  to  the  individual  himself  as  the  source  of  his  own 
happiness  and  salvation.  Reason  and  philosophy  fail  to  satisfy  the 
spiritual  needs  of  the  people  and  eventually  religion  in  some  sort  is 
sought  as  a  salvation  and  guide.  Christianity  reinforces  this  emphasis 
on  the  individual  as  the  center  of  experience.  The  entire  universe 
becomes  simply  the  means  whereby  mankind  works  out  salvation.  If 
God  may  reveal  himself  to  the  humblest,  then  every  individual  is  poten¬ 
tially  a  channel  of  revelation  and  his  experiences  may  attain  to  objective 
validity.  Emotion  and  feeling,  the  most  essentially  subjective  in 
character  of  all  mental  faculties,  are  for  the  first  time  conceived  of  as 
having  worth  in  themselves.  True,  the  formalizing  of  Christianity  into 
the  dogmas  of  the  church  and  the  preservation  of  the  authority  of  the 
church  tended  to  confine  revelation  to  an  historic  period,  but  personality 
has  been  recognized,  the  possibility  of  the  reconstruction  of  the  self  and 
of  society  acknowledged  in  the  doctrine  of  the  new  birth,  and  the  external 
authority  of  the  church  condemned  by  the  very  theory  on  which  it  is 
built. 

The  increase  of  commerce  and  industry,  the  discovery  of  new  coun¬ 
tries,  the  sudden  advance  of  science,  and  the  dissatisfaction  with  the 
barrenness  of  scholastic  thought,  all  indicate  the  steady  movement  away 
from  the  dogmatic  authority  of  the  objective  to  the  claiming  of  objective 
validity  for  the  experience  of  the  individual  as  such.  The  revival  of 
learning,  the  Reformation,  new  theories  of  the  state  advanced  by  Hobbes 
and  Locke,  the  philosophies  of  Descartes,  Leibnitz,  Locke,  Hume,  and 
finally  Kant  and  Hegel,  the  French  Revolution,  all  mark  the  individual’s 
discovery  of  himself  and  of  his  supreme  importance  in  the  universe. 
Kant  takes  the  last  step  of  carrying  the  entire  world  of  objects  over 
into  the  subject  which  becomes  the  constructive  center  of  the  world,  the 
seat  of  law  and  order.  The  tendency  is,  therefore,  to  rob  external  authori¬ 
ty  of  all  claim  to  validity  since  nothing  is  valid  which  does  not  spring 
from  the  very  nature  of  the  self.  But,  as  each  self  is  equally  the  touch¬ 
stone  of  validity,  and  as  there  is  no  essential  bond  uniting  any  one  self 
to  any  other,  there  seems  to  be  no  way  of  bringing  together  this  world 
of  atomistic  individuals  unless  authority  be  vested  in  some  external 
source  and  the  selves  be  voluntarily  limited  for  the  sake  of  harmony 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  47 


and  the  safe  enjoyment  of  partial  freedom.  Typical  was  the  difficulty 
which  Hobbes  faced.  There  is  no  natural'  basis  for  the  state  when 
individuals  are  all  laws  unto  themselves  and  exist  originally  as  inde¬ 
pendent  atoms.  It  is  easy  to  perceive  that  each  atom  has  rights,  but 
its  rights  will  be  obtained  only  at  the  expense  of  another  atom’s  rights. 
Rights  of  individuals  are  as  antagonistic  as  they  are  inherent  and  valid, 
and  satisfaction  for  one  individual’s  rights  must  needs  mean  suppression 
for  the  equally  valid  rights  of  the  next  one.  Rights  are  thought  of  as 
independent  entities,  as  hard  and  fixed  as  the  individual  himself,  and  they 
are  treated  as  if  they  enjoyed  some  kind  of  absolute  existence  apart 
from  their  exercise  in  the  actual  social  institutions  of  the  time.  Their 
dependence  for  reality  on  a  social  order  and  concrete  social  organization 
is  overlooked  to  a  large  extent. 

About  the  time  of  the  French  Revolution,  the  contagion  begins  to 
reach  women  and  following  in  the  steps  of  the  men  a  few  groups  here  and 
there  demand  the  rights  that  inhere  in  every  human  being  for  women  also. 
The  leaders  of  the  Revolution  give  them  no  encouragement.  Special 
limitation  by  God  and  Nature  is  the  ground  on  which  women  are  for¬ 
bidden  to  appeal  to  the  doctrines  on  which  men  base  their  claims.  Never¬ 
theless,  the  appeal  is  made  by  women  like  Olympia  de  Gouges  and  Mary 
Wollstonecraft,  and  is  supported  by  such  men  as  Condorcet  and  John 
Stuart  Mill.  It  is  not  strange  that  the  woman  movement  in  its  first 
stages  followed  the  general  line  of  development  in  philosophical  and  social 
doctrine  and  voiced  the  same  cry  for  abstract  rights  inhering  in  women 
as  individuals  apart  from  their  relations  as  mothers,  wives,  and  daughters. 
Theoretical  recognition  of  their  equality  with  men  and  of  their  natural 
rights  similar  in  every  particular  to  those  possessed  by  men  seems  to  be 
the  goal  of  their  efforts.  The  fact  that  rights  to  be  real  and  actual 
involve  the  concrete  freedom  of  realizing  to  the  utmost  their  fundamental 
relations  to  society,  that  they  mean  not  bare,  abstract  assent  but  definite 
social  channels  through  which  they  become  effective  and  thus  real, 
that  the  supreme  right  is  the  right  to  function  normally  as  an  organic 
part  of  the  social  whole,  is  not  yet  conscious  with  the  majority  of  the 
progressive  women  any  more  than  it  is  with  the  men.  Emphasis  on 
bare  rights  apart  from  obligations  and  responsibilities  leads  us  to  a  species 
of  anti-social,  man-hating  individualism  on  the  part  of  the  pioneers  in 
the  woman  movement.  The  satisfaction  they  demand  for  their  own 
rights  seems  to  involve  taking  away  from  others.  If  women  gain  rights, 
men  must  lose  them.  There  arises  an  atmosphere  of  hostility;  every 
woman  for  herself  and  against  every  man.  This  finds  expression  in 


48 


WOMAN  MOVEMENT  EROM  VIEW  OE  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 


declarations  of  rights  such  as  the  one  given  out  by  the  first  Women’s 
Rights  Convention  in  the  United  States,  in  1848,  beginning,  “The 
history  of  mankind  is  a  history  of  repeated  injuries  and  usurpations  on 
the  part  of  man  towards  woman,  having  in  direct  object  the  establishment 
of  an  absolute  tyranny  over  her.”  All  of  this  only  reflects  the  principle 
of  such  a  theory  as  that  of  Hobbes  in  which  there  is  no  basis  for  the 
union  of  individuals  except  through  external  authority  and  in  which 
common  ends  are  inconceivable  because  each  man  can  seek  only  his  own 
satisfaction.  Just  this  conception  of  the  individual  was  used  to  oppose 
the  entrance  of  women  into  wider  fields  of  activity  long  after  it  had 
ceased  to  be  applied  to  men.  The  interests  of  women  and  of  men  were 
assumed  to  be  mutually  hostile  and  exclusive.  If  society  were  to  be 
maintained  in  harmony,  women  must  voluntarily  submit  to  having  their 
rights  curtailed. 

The  third  level  of  consciousness  which  is  but  now  being  glimpsed  by 
the  advance  guard  of  civilization  is  that  of  the  recognition  of  the  social 
character  of  all  experience,  cognitive  as  well  as  emotional  and  affective. 
Methods  of  control  have  been  worked  out  in  the  realm  of  the  sciences, 
but  they  were  supposed  to  concern  objects  quite  different  from  those 
involved  in  social  interaction  in  the  obvious  sense.  Now  that  abstract 
intellectual  processes  of  science  are  seen  to  be  built  up  like  the  rest  of 
the  self  through  social  consciousness,  the  entire  social  organization  and 
the  selves  within  it  are  perceived  to  be  equally  objective  and  real,  and  to 
offer  problems  that  can  in  time  be  solved  by  a  reflective  process  which  is 
not  alien  but  flesh  of  their  flesh.32  It  is  beginning  to  dawn  on  humanity 
that  selves  are  made,  not  born,  and  that  it  is  possible  to  exert  some  con¬ 
trol  over  the  conditions  which  determine  personality  since  they  can  in  a 
measure  be  stated.  People  are  realizing  that  the  kind  of  selves  that  are 
found  in  the  slum  districts  of  big  cities  make  undesirable  citizens  and  will 
continue  to  do  so;  that  punishment  as  such  does  not  change  the  criminal; 
that  prostitution  is  in  fact  a  social  evil  and  that  its  existence  under  any 
regulations,  however  strict,  is  a  direct  influence  on  the  formation  of  the 
selves  of  the  community  and  that  it  cannot  be  isolated  because,  so  long 
as  it  affects  part,  the  whole  is  formed  with  reference  to  that  part. 

The  third  level  sees  that  there  was  no  basis  for  the  state  in  the  con¬ 
ception  of  humanity  as  composed  of  atomistic  individuals;  that  if  we 
start  with  separate  units  we  can  never  hope  to  put  them  together. 

32C.  H.  Cooley,  Human  Nature  and  the  Social  Order ,  chaps,  v,  vi;  Josiah  Royce, 
Psychology,  chap,  xii;  J.  M.  Baldwin,  Mental  Development,  Vol.  II,  Bk.  I;  Josiah 
Royce,  Studies  in  Good  and  Evil,  chaps,  vi,  vii,  viii. 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 


49 


The  foundation  of  the  state  is  the  inherent  social  impulses  and  organi¬ 
zation  of  the  individuals  that  compose  it.  There  need  be  no  contradic¬ 
tion  in  the  seeking  of  a  common  end  by  many  individuals.  When  ends 
are  conceived  of  as  objective  and  real,  not  as  mere  subjective  states  of 
satisfaction,  it  is  evident  that  they  must  be  sought  in  common  if  they 
are  to  be  completely  realized.  Individuals  are  so  interrelated  and 
dependent  that  each  one  depends  on  the  rest  for  obtaining  his  own  ends. 
No  person  can  seek  his  own  health  as  his  object  excluding  all  reference 
to  the  health  of  his  neighbors.  Unless  health  is  a  common  object  of 
desire  in  a  community  and  is  sought  for  by  each  person  with  regard  to 
all  others,  no  one  individual  is  safe  from  infection.  The  same  is  true 
with  reference  to  protection  and  education  of  children.  No  one  can 
be  sure  of  gaining  for  his  own  family  any  advantages  which  conditions 
do  not  make  secure  for  the  majority.  If  my  neighbor  is  not  safe,  I  am  in 
danger;  if  his  children  can  grow  up  in  ignorance,  mine  also  run  a  risk, 
for  individual  fortunes  come  and  go.  Rights,  too,  are  recognized  as 
concrete  functions  in  an  organized  society  dependent  for  existence  upon 
that  society  and  are  no  longer  thought  of  as  absolute  entities  inhabiting 
an  absolute  self.  My  rights,  unless  realized  along  with  those  of  other 
people  through  the  forms  of  a  social  order,  are  nothing  but  abstractions. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  humanity  is  actually  seeing  the  birth  of  the 
third  stage  of  consciousness,  but  men  are  very  slow  to  realize  the  full 
import  of  its  social  character.  They  continue  to  accept  their  social 
relations  unreflectively,  as  they  always  have.  They  are  conscious  of  the 
more  obvious  ones  in  a  way,  but  many  that  are  not  so  apparent  they 
fail  to  recognize  as  social  at  all.  What  a  comparatively  modern  move¬ 
ment  is  the  study  of  the  child  and  his  relationships  to  parents  and  teachers 
from  his  own  point  of  view!  Here  was  one  of  the  fundamental  social 
relations,  taken  as  a  matter  of  course  for  ages,  and  only  in  our  own 
times  subjected  to  reflection  and  brought  to  consciousness.  The  habitual, 
automatic  character  of  sex  relations  is  only  now  being  shown  up  in  the 
efforts  to  spread  information  regarding  the  most  ordinary,  normal 
phenomena  of  sex  life  and  in  the  blind  resistance  such  efforts  are  meeting 
in  many  quarters.  Eugenics  marks  the  birth  of  sex  conscience  with 
regard  to  the  unreflective  exercise  of  a  basic  social  impulse.  The  begin¬ 
nings  of  organized  efforts  to  understand  the  social  evil  are  likewise  the 
result  of  this  attempt  to  comprehend  and  bring  to  light  all  the  hidden 
meanings  and  far-reaching  influence  of  the  sex  instinct.  All  this  is 
far  from  being  conscious  with  the  mass  of  people  and  still  further  removed 
is  any  adequate  consciousness  of  those  far-reaching  social  connections 


50  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OE  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

which  are  obscured  by  distance,  lack  of  direct  personal  contact,  and  the 
abstract  character  of  the  economic  interests  involved.  But  even  here 
awakening  is  promised  in  such  phenomena  as  labor  unions,  the  Con¬ 
sumers’  League,  the  Trade  Union  League,  laws  for  factory  inspection 
and  the  protection  of  women  and  children  who  labor,  workmen’s  com¬ 
pensation  acts,  and  the  birth  of  a  new  political  party  which  tries  to 
represent  this  consciousness. 

Full  self-consciousness  will  never  be  approached,  however,  until  all 
social  relationships  are  recognized  and  understood  in  all  their  bearings 
and  the  self  of  the  individual  is  consciously  built  up  with  reference  to 
them.  A  father  is  only  nominally  such  if  he  has  not  a  personality  which 
corresponds  to  and  is  formed  by  his  relation  to  his  children  and  consciously 
so.  A  man  may  have  begotten  many  children,  but  if  he  does  not 
know  them,  never  sees  them  nor  has  any  connection  with  them,  he  is 
not  a  father  for  he  possesses  no  father  self.  Just  so,  when  our  con¬ 
sciousness  of  social  relations  becomes  more  sensitive  and  complex,  we 
shall  not  know  what  it  is  to  treat  any  social  relation  abstractly.  The 
man  to  whom  we  sell  or  from  whom  we  buy,  the  man  who  works  in  our 
factory  or  for  whom  we  work,  although  we  are  removed  from  direct 
personal  contact  and  the  relation  seems  to  be  purely  economic,  will  be 
for  us  an  “other”  and  our  relationship  to  him  will  be  known  for  what  it 
is,  a  truly  social  affair,  and  will  correspond  to  and  constitute  a  phase 
of  our  self-consciousness. 

In  the  meantime,  partially  unconscious  social  relations  or  relations 
whose  social  character  is  not  perceived,  continue  to  affect  the  individual 
and  society  whose  repsonses  to  them  are  entirely  inadequate.  Where 
an  individual  is  treating  a  social  situation  abstractly  as  if  it  were  purely 
economic  for  example,  he  is  bringing  about  certain  results  which  he 
does  not  foresee,  which  are  not  part  of  his  conscious  purpose,  and  which 
are  therefore  entirely  uncontrolled  in  their  reaction  upon  himself  and 
upon  society  at  large.  Since  the  social  factors  in  the  situation  are 
overlooked,  since  there  is  no  social  self  corresponding  to  them,  no  evalua¬ 
tion  of  them,  the  self  and  society  are  being  determined  in  a  purely 
accidental  and  external  way  with  regard  to  them.  Internal  control 
will  be  possible  only  when  the  self  that  reacts  to  the  situation  is  conscious 
of  the  real  nature  of  all  the  relations  involved  and  presents  a  self  organized 
with  reference  to  them. 

On  the  first  level  of  consciousness,  control  is  bound  to  be  from  the 
outside  in  the  form  of  arbitrary  authority.  Thought  is  not  sufficiently 
aware  of  its  own  method  to  feel  any  assurance  even  over  against  the 


SOCIAL  THEORY  OF  SELF  AS  GROUND  OF  WOMAN  MOVEMENT 


51 


physical  object  which  it  still  accepts  as  something  given.  In  all  social 
institutions,  government,  the  church,  the  family,  authority  is  the  key¬ 
note.  It  is  the  period  of  unquestioning  obedience  on  the  part  of  the  sub¬ 
ject  to  the  lord,  wife  to  husband,  children  to  parents,  apprentice  to  master, 
slave  to  owner.  Lack  of  freedom  is  softened  by  the  social  impulses 
which  act  as  a  check  on  egoistic  tendencies  and  which  cannot  fail  to  be 
aroused  when  social  life  is  so  simple,  direct,  and  personal. 

In  the  second  stage,  when  society  flies  apart  into  hostile  individuals, 
thought  recognizes  its  own  power  in  handling  the  physical  world,  but 
social  control  must  still  be  an  external  affair  although  it  is  no  longer  a 
matter  of  arbitrary  authority.  Instead  there  arise  the  theories  of 
competition  and  contract.  Control  will  be  chiefly  such  as  results  from 
the  natural  friction  among  the  atoms,  a  mechanical  pull  and  haul. 
Each  individual  is  to  be  left  to  get  what  he  can  for  himself  with  only 
enough  interference  to  make  organized  society  possible.  Each  atom 
retains  all  the  abstract  freedom  which  was  not  sacrificed  to  the  govern¬ 
ment  as  essential  to  orderly  living. 

Our  age  is  witnessing  the  disappearance  of  the  isolated  individual 
and  the  growth  of  an  internal  control  based  on  the  recognition  of  the 
dependence  of  the  individual  on  social  relations  and  his  actual  interest 
in  social  goods  and  in  the  discovery  that  thought  is  social  in  origin  and 
can  be  used  to  advantage  in  the  social  as  well  as  in  the  physical  world. 
The  freedom  that  was  supposed  to  reside  in  the  individual  is  seen  to  be 
realized  only  through  society.  The  individual  is  not  economically  or 
morally  free  except  when  he  is  able  to  express  himself,  to  realize  his  ends 
through  the  common  life.33  As  an  individual,  he  is  powerless  to  deter¬ 
mine  his  own  actions  beyond  a  certain  point.  He  must  think  with  society 
and  make  his  thought  effective  through  social  media  or  he  has  no  control. 
Moreover,  the  hypotheses  which  he  offers  as  solutions  to  social  problems 
must  include  as  part  of  the  data  to  be  considered  the  impulses  and 
interests,  the  point  of  view,  of  all  classes  of  people,  if  they  are  to  be 
successful.  In  other  words,  not  only  is  thought  social  in  origin,  but  it 
keeps  a  social  content  and  character.  The  individual  must  think  as  a 
social  being,  must  take  over  the  points  of  view  of  all  his  social  “others” 
if  his  thinking  is  to  be  true  in  a  social  order,  that  is,  the  value  of  his  thought 
in  handling  social  questions  is  tested  just  as  it  is  in  handling  physical 
problems,  by  the  adequacy  with  which  it  covers  all  the  data  involved. 
Hypotheses  which  ignore  the  interests  of  entire  classes  of  people,  which 
fail  to  recognize  existing  social  relations,  will  not  work  in  the  long  run. 

MDewey  and  Tufts,  Ethics,  chap.  xx. 


52  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  EROM  VIEW  OE  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

The  hard  and  unyielding  individual  with  his  boundless,  empty  freedom 
is  compensated  for  the  loss  of  his  abstract  rights  by  the  discovery  that 
concrete  freedom,  an  actual  realizing  of  his  own  powers,  is  possible 
through  a  social  order  and  through  a  selfhood  that  grows  in  an  intelli¬ 
gible  way  and  is,  therefore,  subject  to  reconstruction  by  the  same  methods 
that  are  continually  changing  the  physical  world  in  accordance  with 
human  desires. 

There  is  no  field  in  which  this  attitude  is  not  making  itself  felt  and 
nowhere  more  clearly  than  in  the  change  that  has  taken  place  in  the 
character  of  the  woman  movement  within  the  last  ten  years.  Even 
militancy,  which  seems  in  its  later  phases  to  be  a  purely  hostile  mani¬ 
festation,  can  hardly  be  classed  with  the  type  of  opposition  character¬ 
istic  of  the  beginning  of  the  woman  movement.  In  its  origin,  at  least, 
violent  and  hostile  demonstrations  were  taken  up  purely  as  a  method¬ 
ology  which  was  thought  necessary  to  success.  It  was  not  in  the  minds 
of  the  originators  a  blind  outbreak  of  hatred  but  a  carefully  thought 
out  plan  based  on  a  theory  of  the  useful  and  peaceful  relation  which 
women  should  bear  to  the  social  order.  If  the  suffragettes  themselves 
have  come  to  the  point  where  their  acts  truly  express  hostile  emotions, 
then  they  have  lost  control  of  their  method  and  thereby  also  the  end 
in  view.  Their  tactics  must  be  judged  pragmatically  and,  in  so  far  as 
they  cease  to  be  merely  tactics,  have  on  the  very  face  of  things  failed  and 
have  become  expressions  of  an  earlier  and  more  limited  consciousness. 
Militant  methods  are  open  to  criticism  not  so  much  because  of  their 
militancy,  but  because  of  their  apparent  futility  when  carried  beyond  a 
certain  point.  In  any  case,  the  militant  movement  represents  only  a 
small  proportion  of  the  advanced  womanhood  of  today  and  it  still 
remains  true  that  to  clamor  for  rights,  to  inveigh  against  men  as  the 
oppressors  of  the  sex,  is  not  only  bad  taste  but  beside  the  mark.  What 
the  thinking  women  of  the  western  civilization,  consciously  or  uncon¬ 
sciously,  are  asking  of  society  today  is  not  the  vote,  not  economic  inde¬ 
pendence,  nor  any  given  right  or  privilege,  but  a  real  hearing,  a  genuine 
and  thoughtful  consideration  of  their  difficulties  from  the  standpoint  of 
the  woman  herself  and  an  attempt  on  the  part  of  society  at  a  reasonable 
adjustment  of  those  difficulties  resulting  in  a  reconstruction  of  the  feudal 
ideal  of  womanhood  such  that  the  modern  woman  will  once  more  be 
brought  into  active  working  relationship  with  the  modern  world. 


IV.  CONCLUSION 


We  are  now  in  a  position  to  take  a  final  survey  of  the  woman  move¬ 
ment  in  its  relation  to  the  larger  stream  of  social  evolution.  The  course 
of  the  preceding  argument  has  been  very  briefly  as  follows:  first,  the 
woman  movement  is  the  expression  of  very  genuine  problems  both  for  the 
individual  woman  and  for  society  as  a  whole;  second,  those  problems 
are  the  result  of  an  unavoidable  conflict  of  impulses  and  habits,  values 
and  standards,  due  to  the  effort  of  trying  to  combine,  without  deliberate 
and  conscious  adjustment  on  the  part  of  society  itself,  two  dissimilar 
worlds;  third,  such  conflicts  are,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  equally  real  for  men 
and  for  women  as  the  labor  movement  testifies,  and  give  evidence  of  a  real 
dualism  of  self  and  social  environment,  of  a  genuine  inequality  between 
the  kind  of  consciousness  actually  developed  and  the  type  of  conscious¬ 
ness  required  to  deal  with  the  complexities  of  modern  social  relations; 
and  finally,  the  restoration  of  equality  between  self  and  environment 
depends  on  the  possibility  of  developing  a  higher  type  of  self-conscious¬ 
ness  whose  perfect  comprehension  of  its  relations  to  other  selves  would 
make  possible  a  controlled  adjustment  of  those  relations  from  the  point 
of  view  of  all  concerned.  We  endeavored  to  show  that  such  a  conception 
rests  upon  a  social  and  dynamic  theory  of  personality  and  pointed  out 
an  actual  development  in  personality  throughout  history  up  to  the 
present  moment  when  the  wished-for  type  is  not  only  desired  but  is  being 
actualized.  In  this  concluding  section,  the  attempt  will  be  to  leave  an 
impression  of  the  woman  movement  stripped  bare  of  the  detail  of  argu¬ 
ment  as  it  appears  in  perspective  to  one  who  looks  at  it  from  the  point 
of  view  indicated  in  the  preceding  discussion. 

The  woman  movement,  viewed  not  as  an  isolated  phenomenon  but 
as  an  integral  part  of  the  vaster  social  evolution,  is  seen  to  be  only  the 
woman’s  side  of  what  from  the  man’s  angle  is  called  the  labor  movement. 
It  is  a  reaction  against  the  same  conditions  and  a  demand  for  changes  in 
the  social  order  such  that  life  will  once  more  become  harmonious.  The 
accident  of  modern  civilization  has  brought  about  inevitable  conflict 
in  the  fundamental  human  impulses  for  both  men  and  women.  It  has 
apparently  allowed  for  complete,  almost  over  expression  of  one  set  of 
impulses,  at  the  expense  of  a  partial  or  sometimes  complete  repression 
of  the  other.  This  has  meant,  of  course,  that  the  set  of  impulses  which 
was  allowed  to  develop  unchecked  by  the  other  set  was  as  abnormal 
and  as  far  from  a  well-balanced  rounded  fulfilment  as  were  the  unex¬ 
pressed  impulses.  The  industrial  and  economic  system  of  today,  which 


54  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  EROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

has  come  into  being  more  or  less  unconsciously  and  accidentally,  has 
so  divorced  the  economic  and  the  social  that  it  is  only  with  a  tremendous 
struggle  for  more  inclusive  forms  of  consciousness  that  we  shall  be  able 
to  recognize  that  the  split  is  only  apparent  and  that  a  system  which  not 
only  believes  in,  but  insists  on,  such  a  separation  results  in  irreconcilable 
dualism  in  the  lives  of  the  men  and  women  involved,  persisting  to  the 
point  of  gigantic  social  problems,  agitations,  and  movements.  Thus 
the  labor  movement  symbolizes  the  impossibility  of  choosing  between 
the  fulfilment  of  the  economic  impulse  and  the  fulfilment  of  the  impulse 
to  live.  Men  are  granted  unlimited  opportunities  to  work,  but  no 
provision  is  made  by  the  system  for  intelligent  parenthood,  for  good 
citizenship,  for  a  thoughtful  development  and  use  of  the  sex  impulse. 
A  man’s  parental  expression  is  limited  to  caring  for  the  economic  welfare 
of  his  family.  His  own  growth  as  a  person  must  be  sacrificed  to  the 
necessity  of  supporting  himself  and  family.  Work  must  be  combined 
with  life,  but  our  system  makes  little  provision  for  such  a  combination, 
hence,  forcing  into  opposition  fundamental  impulses  clamoring  for 
expression.  The  labor  movement  demands  a  new  society  in  which 
creative,  sexual,  parental,  and  other  social  impulses  will  have  an  unques¬ 
tioned  right  to  fulfilment. 

With  women,  on  the  other  hand,  social  impulses  are  the  only  ones 
which  are  overtly  recognized.  Women  are  constantly  forced  into  the 
economic  world,  but  the  system  ignores  that  fact  and  provides  in  no  way 
for  combining  the  peculiar  social  function  of  women  with  any  economic 
function  which  they  may  find  desirable  or  necessary.  Such  economic 
expression  as  has  been  conceded  to  them  is  confined  to  the  home.  Like¬ 
wise,  the  other  impulses,  even  the  maternal,  have  no  recognized  place 
outside  the  limits  of  the  individual  home.  For  the  woman,  the  system  has 
no  avenues  of  fulfilment  foreseen  and  provided  beforehand  for  any  impulse 
whatsoever  outside  the  home  itself.  Everything  which  has  opened  up 
has  been  at  best,  even  after  long  and  patient  effort,  only  makeshift  and 
haphazard.  Society  is  always  emphasizing  the  obligation  of  the  woman 
to  carry  out  the  sex  and  maternal  impulses  at  all  costs  and  minimizing 
the  need  or  value  of  the  economic  so  far  as  she  is  concerned.  In  the 
conditions  of  living  which  are  forced  upon  her,  she  is  compelled  to  make 
the  sorry  choice  of  a  limited  sex  and  maternal  expression  or  a  doubtful 
and  hazardous  attempt  on  the  economic  side.  In  either  case,  she  loses 
so  far  as  society’s  aid  or  prevision  is  concerned.  Only  by  the  extra¬ 
ordinary  force  of  a  powerful  personality  will  she  make  a  signal  success 
at  either  venture.  Society  no  more  makes  a  thoughtful  attempt  to 


CONCLUSION 


55 


give  the  maternal  interests  the  most  complete  development  and  employ¬ 
ment  possible  than  it  makes  any  pretense  at  all  of  using  intelligently 
the  natural  impulse  of  the  woman  to  be  of  economic  value  in  the  world. 
Much  less  does  it  offer  a  rational  scheme  for  combining  both  motives 
within  a  possible  form  of  living  for  the  average  normal  woman.  Thus  the 
woman,  even  more  than  the  man,  faces  a  perfectly  hopeless  alterna¬ 
tive.  Neither  side  at  the  present  moment  is  overwhelmingly  attractive 
in  itself  even  apart  from  the  sacrifice  of  other  impulses  which  its  choice 
involves.  What  woman  would  willingly  abandon  love  and  children? 
What  normal  woman  would  accept  a  life  in  which  she  gave  up  all  effort 
at  serious  work  of  genuine  economic  value  to  society?  What  woman 
would  attempt  without  shrinking  the  almost  impossible  task  of  combining 
the  two  as  affairs  stand  today?  Above  all,  what  woman  would  under¬ 
take  wifehood  and  motherhood  with  the  limitations  placed  on  it  by 
our  present  social  system  and  feel  that  those  two  fundamental  parts 
of  herself  could  ever  reach  a  satisfactory  and  adequate  fulfilment? 

That  the  peculiarly  unhappy  position  of  the  woman  is  a  reality  and 
not  an  illusion  can  be  detected  in  the  arguments  used  to  convince  woman 
of  her  obligation  to  bear  and  rear.  The  element  of  sacrifice  is  so  obvious 
that  it  is  even  seized  upon  and  treated  as  a  virtue,  an  added  glory  for 
the  crown  of  the  wife  and  mother.  Moreover,  this  notion  of  necessary 
sacrifice  on  the  part  of  the  woman  and  the  bare  fact  of  motherhood 
itself  have  grown  into  a  sort  of  fetish.  The  experiences  of  motherhood 
are  exalted  to  the  point  where  they  are  assumed  to  be  a  sufficient  com¬ 
pensation  for  any  and  all  sacrifices.  To  silence  our  own  doubts  and 
justify  our  procedure,  we  have  come  to  believe  in  the  inherent  and 
absolute  value  to  the  woman  of  the  mere  fact  of  giving  birth  to  a  child, 
even  though  the  emotions  and  purposes  thus  originated  are  never  carried 
past  the  instinctive  or  intuitive  level  to  a  rationalized  and  socialized 
expression.  We  are  afraid  to  face  the  fact  that  the  home  in  its  present 
unrelated,  individual  form  does  demand  of  women,  and  men  too  for  that 
matter,  a  sacrifice  so  great  as  to  have  lost  a  large  part  of  its  value 
for  spiritual  growth,  an  overwhelming  and  crushing  sacrifice  of  the 
possibilities  of  motherhood  and  fatherhood  that  defeats  its  own  end. 

All  of  this  hopeless  conflict  among  impulses  which  the  woman  feels 
she  has  legitimate  right,  even  a  moral  obligation,  to  express,  all  of  the 
rebellion  against  stupid,  meaningless  sacrifice  of  powers  that  ought  to 
be  used  by  society,  constitutes  the  force,  conscious  or  unconscious, 
which  motivates  the  woman  movement  and  will  continue  to  vitalize 
it  until  some  adjustment  is  made. 


56  WOMAN  MOVEMENT  FROM  VIEW  OF  SOCIAL  CONSCIOUSNESS 

The  labor  movement  and  the  woman  movement  do  not  understand 
always  how  close  is  their  relationship,  nor  do  they  see  clearly  that  the 
reason  why  the  obviously  stupid  and  unsuitable  social  conditions  which 
they  combat  are  so  difficult  to  alter  is  because  human  beings  have  not 
yet  arrived  at  the  stage  where  they  know  how  to  attack  and  solve  social 
problems.  The  real  goal  of  both  movements  is  a  society  whose  con¬ 
sciousness  shall  have  reached  the  social  stage  and  hence  is  capable  of 
dealing  scientifically  with  social  as  well  as  physical  problems,  a  society 
which  no  longer  leaves  the  social  forms  and  relationships  whereby  human 
impulses  are  expressed  to  chance  or  physical  force,  but  subjects  them  to 
rational  control. 

In  the  physical  world  we  have  at  last  become  conscious  of  our 
method  and  hence  have  acquired  a  control  over  physical  conditions 
which  promises  to  become  more  and  more  complete.  If  the  desire 
arises  in  a  community  to  do  something  for  which  present  physical  con¬ 
ditions  make  no  allowance,  it  becomes  instantly  a  problem  for  the  experts 
and  it  is  only  a  question  of  time  when  a  way  will  be  found  for  the  gratifi¬ 
cation  of  the  felt  need.  The  very  basis  of  the  physical  problem  is  the 
thwarted  desire  of  human  beings  to  do  something  and  the  method  of 
obtaining  the  end  is,  of  course,  a  full  and  free  admission  of  the  inherent 
right  and  value  of  the  desire,  a  deliberate  searching  for  every  element 
involved  in  the  physical  conditions  of  the  problem,  and  a  careful  experi¬ 
mental  attempt  to  find  the  combination  which  will  satisfy  all  the  condi¬ 
tions.  We  should  not  consider  our  problem  solved  if  the  scientist 
said  to  us,  “You  do  not  really  want  this  thing,  you  only  imagine  it,  and 
in  any  case  it  would  be  bad  for  you  to  have  it.  You  have  managed  to 
live  all  these  years  without  it,  why  complain  now?”  Imagine  such  an 
answer  to  the  determination  to  fly  in  the  air.  But,  supposing,  if  we 
persisted  in  our  wish  to  fly  and  began  to  talk  about  it  and  clamor  for  a  way 
to  be  opened,  the  authorities  were  to  turn  on  us,  demand  silence  on  pain 
of  arrest  and  imprisonment,  label  us  socialists  or  anarchists,  and  tell  us 
we  were  rebelling  against  the  fixed  and  righteous  order  of  things  as  they 
are.  Should  we  consider  that  any  attempt  had  been  made  at  solving 
our  problem  of  how  to  make  a  machine  that  would  fly  in  the  air?  Yet, 
impossible  as  it  may  seem,  that  is  thus  far  the  favorite  method  of  dealing 
with  any  unsatisfied,  insufficiently  expressed  set  of  human  wants,  whose 
fulfilment  would  mean  change  of  the  social  order.  First,  deny  the 
existence  of  the  want;  second,  call  it  wicked,  foolish,  or  injurious  to 
individual  and  society;  third,  suppress  it  by  force — and  you  have  dealt 
with  it  adequately.34 

34For  a  complete  presentation  of  this  failure  of  our  civilization  to  handle  its  social 
problems  see  Walter  Lippmann’s  Preface  to  Politics. 


CONCLUSION 


57 


The  chief  task  of  all  social  movements,  then,  must  be  at  first  to  impress 
upon  the  rest  of  society  the  right  of  unsatisfied  and  unexpressed  human 
impulses  to  constitute  a  real  problem  worthy  of  the  same  amount  of 
expert  attention  whether  they  demand  a  new  way  of  crossing  the  Atlantic 
Ocean  or  a  new  combination  of  work  and  social  expression  in  the  lives 
of  men  and  women.  This  they  will  never  bring  about  until  there  is  a 
sufficient  number  of  people  who  are  so  socially  sensitive  and  adaptable 
that  they  feel  within  themselves  as  their  own  the  impulses  and  points 
of  view  of  all  classes  and  both  sexes.  Such  individuals  will  be  the  social 
scientists  who  will  offer  solutions  to  our  social  problems  because  they  are 
able  to  place  themselves  at  the  very  heart  of  these  problems  and  thus 
to  comprehend  the  conditions,  the  unsatisfied,  conflicting  impulses, 
upon  the  harmonization  and  fulfilment  of  which  any  solution  that  has 
the  right  to  the  name  must  be  based.  The  fundamental  purpose  of  the 
woman  movement,  therefore,  as  of  any  great  social  movement,  is  bound 
to  be  the  producing  of  social  scientists  who  will  be  capable  of  offering 
hypotheses  that  are  based  on  the  actual  data  constituting  the  problems, 
and  the  bringing  about  of  an  increasing  social  consciousness  among  all 
people  such  that  they  too  will  become  sufficiently  aware  of  the  real 
content  of  social  relationships  to  be  willing  to  undergo  the  adjustments 
of  the  social  order  necessary  to  make  actual  the  theories  which  promise 
salvation. 


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